Archive for June 3rd, 2008

Occasionally my dad will come home with a pile of eclectic publications I’ve never seen before (or since he last did this), and I will stack them with the rest of my planned reading. A couple of days ago he gave me, among others, the Summer 2008 issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review which could very well turn out to be my newest subscription.

One article which spurred a bunch of thoughts was entitled “Less is More” and available here behind a registration wall (when will publishers learn?). In it, the authors point out what major actors in the development field often fail to remember: necessity is the mother of all invention.

Lissa Valikangas and Michael Gibbert see scarcity not as a barrier which must be overcome through massive amounts of aid. Instead, it induces creative innovations which very well may become marketable designs. As development economist William Easterly is famous for extolling: billions of dollars of aid have been spent and the poor nations supposedly helped have seen little progress or, in certain cases, reversals of fortune. In fact, external aid can severely distort markets and even cause “Dutch Disease,” the term economists use to describe the negative effects of resource exploitation.

What Valikangas and Gibbert propose is a refocusing of aid to “build on local tinkering that already exists and supply the often minimal extra resources needed to scale them up.” To them, resource constraints present an opportunity to foster innovation.

Similarly, Amy Smith of MIT proposes cheap technological fixes to the problems of the developing world. Technology, understood in this way, is more similar to the Greek origin of “craft.” It is not computers or large scale networks. Smith designs simple tools that ease daily concerns. In her interview at the New Yorker conference, she shows off rough metal objects which significantly reduce the time and effort needed to make charcoal or shell corn. The extra time or product can be used for other activities previously off-limits to the inhabitants of a resource poor area.

In times of grand thinking, it is often the most simple ideas which really reduce the burden of living on less than a dollar per day. Understanding these burdens requires a intimate knowledge of the developing world, one that comes from outside the classroom and beyond books. So what are you waiting for?