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
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Global warming makes all this impoverishment of soils and inefficient biomass burning everybody’s problem. Loss of soil carbon and deforestation account for a significant part of the excess CO2 going into the atmosphere, as well as black carbon particulate pollution, which exacerbates global warming.
Biofuels in the tropics are often burned for light and to drive away insects, mosquitos in particular, inefficient as this may be. There are now pica-scale solar units being marketed through innovative strategies to charge cell phones and provide 2 watt LED lighting.
Mosquito nets are only a partial solution as they cut off air circulation and on hot and humid nights leave the user stewing in his own sweat. I know this from Georgia, where I lived, which is becoming increasingly tropical. Nights when the temperature is over 80 degrees til well after midnight and the dewpoint is 75 and there is no wind make sleep impossible. But even a 1 watt fan that runs on a USB plug makes all the difference.
Reliable provision of these very minor amounts of electricity is essential to conquering malaria. Malaria was endemic in the United States before 1940. It was eliminated by separating the human population from the mosquito population by means of electric lights, glass windows, and window screens. Besides, the alternative for light at night is kerosene lamps and these are too expensive for many people, give inadequate light, and degrade air quality in the home.
The pica scale photovoltaic providers all envision upgrading their customers to more substantial photovoltaic units powering radios, TV’s , computers, etc., bringing even very isolated people into the world civilization and information base. However, photovoltaic provides plenty of power when not much is really needed, not enough when it is really needed, say when people are stuck indoors with the mosquitoes in gloomy rainy season weather. Especially where users have become dependent on a larger, reliable supply, backup is needed.
From what I’ve been able to determine, the low hanging fruit in backup systems is piston engine generators driving alternators of about 1 kw for battery catch-up, running on charcoal gas. With properly made charcoal the amount of gas filtration needed is very minor, the gasifiers are durable and run reliably. These could be built as CHP units or the gas piped off for other uses besides. I’ve built one of these systems, largely out of junk, video’d it extensively, and got a bit of run time on it, to see what would go bust first. Nothing went bust so this was like watching paint dry. Worked out problems of fuel metering, reliable performance of the gasifier and so on, which had to do with eliminating feedbacks between various parts of the system. Low tech and quite user friendly. If interested, get in touch.