[Photo: Christopher Frey]

Technological interventions have often been held up as an almost panacea for meeting development challenges in poor countries. I have two magazine articles now nearing publication, both of them dealing with West Africa’s food security and how it’s being addressed by various competing development strategies. The material also figures in the book, especially the emergence of ’social entrepreneurship’ and the debate over our fetishization of novel, often high-tech solutions to seemingly intractable social and economic problems.

Looking to technology for dramatic fixes can be taken to costly and ill-advisedly utopian extremes, as best exemplified in the staggering array of programs prescribed by Millenium Development Goal advocates like economist Jeffrey Sachs. Technology is only part of the solution, as it cannot alone end the unfair land distribution policies, income disparity, social conflict and ethnic discrimination that are core contributors to poverty.

I’ve previously cited American economist William Easterly here, as I interviewed him for the book during a recent visit to New York. Easterly is best known for his criticism of  Sachs and celebrity-fronted campaigns such as Make Poverty History. He argues too much of what passes for development are futile top-down exercises driven not by local demand but by donors; they come with political strings attached, require too much capital and rely too heavily on foreign expertise, inputs and technology. Most importantly, the traditional aid model fails to recognize how economic growth and poverty reduction are best enabled.

Another important academic writing on the topic is 36-year-old French development economist Esther Duflo, currently a professor at MIT. Check out last week’s profile of Duflo in The Independent. Like Easterly she’s devoted her research to understanding why the trillions of dollars spent on development projects in poor countries have yielded so few demonstrable results, randomly and scrupulously testing the results of various anti-poverty iniatives.

The article reports on a speech Duflo recently gave in Paris:

“Despite billions thrown at “development”, she said, desperate poverty thrives. Two solutions are usually prescribed: give up and rely on the market; or throw in more billions. Mme Duflo believes in a “third way”: making anti-poverty programmes work better.

Instead of imposing abstract theories, she said, economists should believe in their “scientific” skills. But they should also be more “modest” and get out more. They should, she says, turn the “dismal science” into a human science, “generous” and determined to make a difference.

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Ron Rivera, who died last August from malaria, was the rare social entrepreneur who understood the interaction of technology and social change. The Puerto-Rican born potter was living in Managua in 1998, when Hurricane Mitch killed 11,000 people and unleashed a bacterial disease in Nicaragua’s water supply. Rivera devised a clay pot that could filter out at least 98 percent of the bacteria in contaminated water, making it safe to drink. The techonology, inspired by a simple Ecuadorian terra cotta pot Rivera once encountered (the clay, when mixed with grist and moulded in a certain way, resulted in thousands of micropores) was cheap ($15 to produce a pot) and easy to duplicate. It was a bottom-up innovation.

Rivera set about establishing clay pot filter factories in Latin America, Africa and Asia that could mass-produce the purifiers locally. He refused to patent the technology, instead making it public domain by posting details of its design online. As the New York Times reports: “He often traveled in the wake of water-related disasters — following floods in Ghana or a tsunami in Sri Lanka — capitalizing on the rush of aid money to establish a locally owned enterprise that would sustain itself long after he left.”

Elements of the design community in Europe and North America have in recent years turned their attention to how it can better service poor populations with innovative solutions, a movement encapsulated by Bruce Mau’s Massive Change project. I have my reservations about the phenomenon, as it mimics so much of the hubris and rhetorical utopianism prevalent in other development ideologies, but it has yielded some imaginative and useful inventions.

A collection of such are on display at the OCAD Professional Gallery in Toronto until January 25. Design for the Other 90% gathers “design solutions addressing the basic needs of poor and marginalized populations not traditionally serviced by professional designers.”