Amy Smith/MIT

Speaking at TED a few years ago, Amy Smith, the MIT professor and McArthur Genius Award recipient, made a compelling case for the widespread introduction of simple technologies that could solve major environmental, public health, and poverty problems in developing countries. Her bio on the TED page sums it up best: Invent cheap, low-tech devices that use local resources, so communities can reproduce her efforts and ultimately help themselves. Smith hatches her ideas at D-Lab, the MIT unit responsible for coming up with some of the coolest technological fixes for two thirds of the world’s population.

If her ideas are so beautiful in their simplicity and so relatively inexpensive to deploy, why haven’t they gained traction in the global development agenda? Perhaps it’s scaleability. Fragmented markets. Or penniless consumers.

With the notable exception of mosquito nets and a few clean water pumps, it seems that simple technological fixes that actually save lives do not figure prominently in development assistance budgets. This is odd considering the significant positive impact that, say, fuel efficient stoves and clean burning briquettes can have on poverty alleviation, public health, and environmental degradation.

Our challenge is to turn critical technological innovations into large-scale campaigns that will rival no-brainer solutions like mosquito-nets-to-combat malaria or the rope pump. Because, really, how hard can it be to improve on three stones, and a pot?  Perhaps what’s lacking are the numbers to justify the cost-benefit analysis. We’ll also need some good marketing and communications. Welcome unemployed social marketers! Welcome statisticians, modelers, researchers! Welcome venture philanthropists. Your time has come!

Amy Smith’s ideas deserve more attention and support.

Kim