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I think Engineers need to not only think broader – i.e. at the related systems causing the poverty, but also AT SCALE, i.e. at the scale of the problem. For example, a small scale, locally built water filter may be the perfect solution for the village you are working with, but have you thought about the next village – if they can’t build it themselves without access to the volunteer engineer, then the work may be great for your personal experience, and even for that village, but has essentially zero impact on poverty. In fact the impact may be negative, as the next village may decide to wait for a voluntourist to come and build them one instead of investigating solutions themselves.
Appropriate technology’s main failure case is IMHO failure to thing through the training and maintenance issues at scale, for example to think through how to empower some local organization to build one of the filters for every village in a district, or to empower a training organization to train these local organizations over an entire country. We need bold, thinking, not something that looks good on a resume, or helps write a paper for a PhD.
Yes, but. We may be helping with improvements in ways, that aren’t measured in the official statistics. Many of the systems we work on, IF they are done in co-operation with the community are both repairable and duplicatible by/in the community. If those actions only require local materials and labor, there may not be a significant money cost or direct economic benefits while still improving lives of the community. For example, latrines (usually easily duplicated at a community level) don’t make a community more wealthy in monetary terms (official measure of poverty), but the lives of the community are improved. So improving lives may not always be reflected in those official statistics. Measurement is always limited by the tools used to do it.
I think Lawrence and Mitra have valid points to the argument. Scale, capacity building, how we measure poverty, all need to be considered. Like the solutions developed, they can’t be in isolation, otherwise, there is too much risk of failure.
Poverty is more properly an economic than engineering problem. The basis of economic success and growth is in property rights, rule of law, free trade, free markets… multiplied by low cost government, transportation, communications… Engineering tends to be involved in higher levels of complexity. We build the tools that make the products, or increasingly: build the tools that build the tools. IOT functionality is orders of magnitude up the value-add food chain.
Thanks to market development in Asia, poverty reduction has been fabulously successful over the past few decades. If the perpetual war in the mideast can ever be resolved or at least reduced, african dictators deposed, and india’s license raj curtailed; the entire planet will have some experience with personal freedom and responsibility. Wealth building takes a generation. The two best times to plant this tree are 10 years ago and today.