MIT Helps Third World With Hands-On Approach

Hugh Pickens writes "About 60 people from 20 nations will descend on the MIT campus July 14th for the second annual International Development Design Summit to begin an intensive month-long process of creating technological solutions for the needs of people in the world's developing nations. The goal of the program is to develop simple, inexpensive devices that in some cases can be produced locally and make a real difference for people and communities. The event is the brainchild of MIT Senior Lecturer Amy Smith, a returned Peace Corps volunteer and a past winner of the MacArthur 'genius' grant. Previous products of Smith's design class include a bike-powered corn sheller, a metal press that can make clean-burning fuel out of agricultural waste, and an electricity-free incubator. The workshop promotes a shift in focus among companies, universities, investors and scientists toward attacking problems that hamper development in the world's poorest places. 'Nearly 90 percent of research and development dollars are spent on creating technologies that serve the wealthiest 10 percent of the world's population,' Ms. Smith said. 'The point of the design revolution is to switch that.'"

Engineers without borders plug

An appropriate place for a plug for Engineers without borders" [ewb-usa.org]

Re:

What hope is there for EWB when then can't even link to their West Coast chapter properly? See this page [ewb-usa.org].

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I hope you emailed them and pointed out the error of their ways. They are nice people to deal with but as non-profit they don't always see the quality of their web presence as the most important thing on their agenda (and yes - I have also had issues with their website in the past)

WHICH Third World?

The problem is that there is a wide range of poorer nations, every of which is "Third World". There are more advanced nations, like Brazil, Mexico, Thailand, there are some in the middle of the road, like India, Egypt, Pakistan, and then there are the desperately poor, like most of Africa.

The technology needed by each group is different. A cheap way of digging a well is not what the people living in a city slum need most. OTOH, a cheap computer will not be much help people who live in mud huts somewhere in Africa.

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The technology "needed"? Funny, there's this odd history book that seems to think that humans lived in Africa for a while before Europeans arrived. I'm not sure, but I hear that in this mysterious time before time, they even didn't have cellphones or the Internet!

What is needed is an end to things like this [thirdworldtraveler.com]. Until the first world nations stop raping third world nations and supporting tinpot dictators just for the sake of guaranteeing access to their resources, human misery will continue wholesale.

Trickle down

90% of research dollars may be spent on creating technologies that are targeted at the richest 10% of the population, but that doesn't mean they don't benefit the other 90%. Think of mobile phones, for example - originally aimed at the Western business elite, but they went on to revolutionise the African economy by creating a fast, efficient communication network between villages where it wasn't feasible to roll out wired infrastructure.

Missing links

For some reason the news office didn't link to D-lab [mit.edu]. But there are actually plenty of groups at MIT doing stuff like this,
including the Public Service Center's IDEAS [mit.edu] competition, several Mech-E student ptojects, Design for Change [mit.edu],
and the spin-off Design that matters [designthatmatters.org].

These groups work on a lot of interesting things. Some of them, like the Kinkajou projector, see somewhat esoteric or "luxurious,"
but others are pretty basic and nifty. There are a lot of bicycle flywheel-moderated pedal powered devices that seem to fill genuine
needs, as does the famous peanut sheller [fullbellyproject.org].

Free/Open Appropriate Technology

is turning into quite a movement.

http://appropedia.org/ [appropedia.org] is like wikipedia but, predictably, for appropriate technology.

http://hexayurt.com/ [hexayurt.com] is a nice little emergency shelter (that's my project.)

http://globalswadeshi.net/ [globalswadeshi.net] takes Gandhi's ideas (like the spinning wheel) and generalizes them into a global picture based on appropriate technology innovations

http://akvo.org/ [akvo.org] does water technology

http://openfarmtech.org/ [openfarmtech.org] does a wide range of systems for a very high standard of living

and there's a lot more out there.

http://www.globalswadeshi.net/video [globalswadeshi.net] has a series of video interviews with people working on appropriate technology in this general vein.

About 30 million people a year could be saved

Basically, when you run the numbers, it seems like about half of all global death is from poverty.

This talk (I presented it about two weeks ago) gives some details, sketches out possible solutions, and puts the whole thing in context.

http://www.globalswadeshi.net/video/video/show?id=2097821%3AVideo%3A1943 [globalswadeshi.net]

Enjoy.

Zug-Zug

The technology is one element of a systemic solution. Go play Warcraft (the original one.) You start out with one grunt. You harvest resources, enhance capabilities, and improve your situation through incremental means. Throughout the process, you've developed an infrastructure that will support your population.

Aw hell! Some bastard sent troops into my Town Square and is tearing the place to shit! Yep, you can expect the local warlord/gang/bunch_of_thugs to do that in the real world as well. You've developed a resource; someone will try to take it from you.

Simply tossing a technological measure at a community won't magically fix things. At a minimum, it'll free up someone to perform another task that wasn't an option before. It's worth doing, but needs to be part of a larger program that helps with developing comprehensive infrastructure.

Sustainability

It's great to see (reading the NY Times article) that this summit includes people from developing countries. Often, these sorts of things just involve people from developed countries dreaming up 'solutions' that sound awesome but wouldn't actually work on the ground, because the focus is only on the technologies and there isn't enough understanding of the people and societies in the developing countries or areas the technology is meant for.

I talked to a volunteer with Engineers Without Borders Canada [ewb.ca] who had this crazy story about rural villages in Mali (in western Africa). In almost every single town he visited (poor farming villages, actually) there was a deep, covered well and pump providing clean, healthy drinking water. And nobody used them. Instead, women from the villages would walk a few kilometres to collect water from a stagnant, parasite-infected pool of water.

Which seems ridiculous to us, maybe, except that collecting water by the pool was an important social event for these women (that standing in line at the well didn't duplicate at all), and that people thought the metal of the pump was unnatural - especially compared to a water source 'in nature', and that no one had really convinced the families in these villages that water from the pump would make their babies more likely to survive.

But it really goes to show that the best-intended engineering or technical solutions (in this case, a foreign NGO's decision a decade or two ago that every Malian village needed a water pump) won't succeed without a better understanding of the people they are meant to help. And that in the end, developing countries will never "make it" because of solutions 'handed down' by first-world organizations; in the end people there need to be empowered to improve their lives and their countries. First-world organizations can help with that, but we can't pretend to understand their communities' needs better than they do.

Out of Poverty, Paul Polak

ObPlug: Paul Polak's "Out of Poverty" program. http://www.paulpolak.com/ [paulpolak.com] He has a deeper-than-surface understanding of 3rd world micro-economics. He introduced simple but effective technologies in many places which have completely transformed the lives of whole villages. Drip irrigation, cheap water storage, treadle-pumps, etc. He also has a book at amazon. Haven't read it yet, but it's on my wish list.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1576754499/ref=ord_cart_shr?_encoding=UTF8&m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&v=glance [amazon.com]

On a related note:
(IMO) our universities must become more than diploma mills for the children of the wealthy, they should (primarily) be incubators for real, functional change. MIT and a few other universities take this seriously and (most importantly) fund it. (See recent articles on break-through solar technology.) I hope they will open-source the fruits of their research.

We somehow need to shift focus from getting-rich-quick to saving a world that needs it. We can't afford to let the 21st century really can't be like the 20th.

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What's more, this is not a technological problem, but a systematic one. This article [npr.org] is from 2006, and even though the problem was apparent even earlier, nothing happens.

So, instead of trying to help the 3rd world countries with tech, we might just try not to harm them with our business practices and subsidies.

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isn't there a shitload of old true-and-tried local technologies

I once saw an interesting example of this. There's a village in the Brazilian northeast where people make cattle bells. The bells themselves are made of steel cut from old oil drums, but what's interesting is the way they braze them.

They cut small pieces of brass from junk and weigh them in a primitive scale, they have a standard pebble that's the right weight of brass for each size of bell. They pile the bells on each other, about ten for a pac

Interestingly, this is often wrong

One thing that holds poor people back is that their equipment is often very primitive. Any method of cooking that needs an open fire or has to heat up a lot of stone is very energy intensive. A Western halogen or induction hob is, by contrast, extremely efficient, heating only what is needed when it is needed. An open fire will often put 80% of the heat output straight up the chimney, whereas I have a very efficient Scandinavian solid fuel stove which puts more than 80% of its output into the house. But the cost of a Jotul or Morso stove would represent maybe five to ten years total income to a third world family.

This is why thinking like this is needed. Expensive but efficient technology needs to be commoditised for Third World production to bootstrap their economies.

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By "nation", surely you mean just the people. For if you included the mineral assets of these nations, you'd be living like Neanderthals in no time (instead of just acting like one on /. ).

A lot of these nations are poor because the Western nations have invaded, raped, pillaged and destroyed their cultures in pursuit of minerals and precious stones.

England enslaved India not because of their love for the curry, but because they wanted to dominate the spice trade.

Leopold invaded Congo for the rubber (w

Re:90% Solution

What you say is a big amount of bollocks.

I suggest you go visit IN PERSON any such country that you berate 'raped, pillaged, destroyed' by teh eviiiil western nations and see for yourself the real causes of their current state.

That should constitute for you a real eye-opening experience.

Re:90% Solution

I am opposed to the argument that poor people are poor because they are doing something wrong. People can be born wealthy, or they can be born poor. The simple fact is, you can only make use of what your environment offers, and in third world countries, that is not much.

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Take a read of Guns, Germs and Steel [wikipedia.org] and then review your comments.

From Jarod Diamond's point of view the west did not become wealthy because of us doing things "right". It became wealthy purely through geographical luck.

Aarguments have been raised in opposition to his book, but I still think that it is a worthwhile read.

Re:90% Solution

a) The wealthiest 10% (referring to the population of the first world) live the way they do because the wealthiest 0.0001% of the world find it profitable to maintain them in a state of fat, mindless consumption.

b) Where do you think your TV, DVD player, cellphone, shoes, socks, PC are manufactured? I guarantee you that the hard labor required to manufacture these goods is not carried out by the fat, lazy people of the first world. They are too busy doing mindless administrative jobs in the office and then asking for time off due to a stubbed toe.

c) Your "survival of the fittest" attitude is a pathetic attempt at rationalizing your own profligate, wasteful and totally unsustainable lifestyle. You're like a child trying to tell yourself that stealing cookies is actually OK. Go travel, realize that the people in the third world actually are people, who work hard for their families and have the same hopes, dreams and ambitions that you have. The only difference between them and you is that their opportunity is undermined by the first world in the name of "profit" and they don't use abhorrent, broken logic to justify their own existence.

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The MIT people may not be the people who design the abusive foreign policy of the US that has resulted in the current state of world affairs, but they need to realize that anything that they come up with will be undermined while the US foreign policy has, as a stated goal, the maintenance of US hegemony over all other nations. While this goal still exists, any attempt by poorer nations to develop themselves will be viewed as a shifting balance of power away from the US rather than the reality, which is a ne

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Unprecedented? It's been happening since the Roman Empire.

In any case, the time when the US was able to dictate policy to the world has passed. China has 1.3 billion, India almost a billion, and 4 billion of the world population lives between Japan and the Arab peninsula. If the US doesn't start cooperating, it's going to fade into irrelevancy.

Actually, you are a troll

and had I not posted on this thread already I would have modded you accordingly. Another poster has made the point about population density often being a good thing. I would like to add to this.

A neighbour is a senior project manager for a development charity, and his view is that a lot of Africa's problems stem from too few people. Below a certain density you do not have the GNP to develop transport, or the manpower to clear swamps and get rid of malaria (for instance.) This is why most Third World development takes place in crowded cities rather than rural areas.

But as to why you are a troll. One North American baby = nearly 12 African babies in terms of resource consumption. In terms of resource consumption, the US uses as much as a Third World country of around 4 billion people, and the EU probably uses as much as 2-3 billion Third World people. Now do you get it? The answer is for US, you (and to a lesser extent me) to stop having growing populations, not the Third World. Then we don't need to build kleptomaniac corporations that steal all their resources.

The average North American uses twice as much energy as the average Briton or German, and two and a half times as much as the average Italian. Germans and Italians have a pretty good lifestyle; I'd much rather live in Munich, say, than most American cities. New York has almost European population densities and energy efficiency, yet it is a desirable place to live. If you could just drive sensibly, live in adequate but not bloated houses, and stop trying to commute fifty miles each way to work by three tonne truck, you would free up enough energy to make a significant difference to the entire Third World. And then you would not need that huge army and the array of missiles, because nobody would be coming after you.

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I agree that 1st world denizens, especially Americans, waste resources ridiculously. But do you accept that pretty much everyone in the world who knows about it wants to have a lifestyle like Americans? This is a serious question. If, as you contend, the developing world needs more people to have the kind of wealth of the developed world, won't they end up being the same kind of mega-consumers? So the eventual result will be an entire earth full of such people? If not, why not?

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People in third world countries make very little money, so they can't save any. When they get old, they need their children to look after them because they don't have any savings and are unable to work [enough to make a living]. Unless you want to die alone of starvation, you NEED to have many babies.
Also, children are much more likely to die in third world countries so it is good policy to have a few spares.
Finally, contraceptives are expensive and/or, depending on your religion of choice, their use may be