Inside a workshop at the edge of this city’s scrappy industrial district, groups of university students, engineers, and others are showcasing a panoply of inventions, all aimed at improving the lives of the rural poor.
The scene is vibrant and chaotic. A village grandmother who had never before seen the city turns the crank of a device constructed to extract oil from the seeds of a moringa tree. Other people crowd around tables to check out a mosquito-repelling, battery-powered lantern housed in an old plastic water bottle; farming implements fashioned out of treated bamboo; and a mobile-phone-based platform for providing farmers with information on crops and markets.
These are the fruits of the International Development Design Summit, a monthlong event conceived by Amy Smith, a senior lecturer in engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which has for the past five years brought together students, lecturers, engineers, farmers, mechanics, and other practitioners from around the world to collaborate on developing products, services, and business models to serve the rural poor. Here, students from Pakistan, Cambodia, Tanzania, Ghana, and the United States work side by side with artisans, teachers, and village chiefs who hail from other countries and from surrounding villages, soaking up a very different sort of education.
While the technologies themselves are neither earth-shattering nor elegant (teams have only five weeks to conceptualize, design, build, and refine their products), what’s innovative about the summit, its organizers say, is its emphasis on design as a collaborative and creative process. It assumes that the farmers and chiefs in the villages for which these products are destined have at least as much to add to the designs as do engineers with Ph.D.'s.
“I dislike the intellectual elitism of academia,” says Ms. Smith, who in 2010 was named one of the world’s 100 most influential people by Time magazine. “You go to these academic conferences with these really smart people, and all they do is talk. At first the idea was to get people together to have a conference making stuff—'prototypes, not papers.’”
After the first summit at MIT, in 2007, Ms. Smith, who has received a MacArthur “genius” fellowship for her earlier work in this area, realized that even more important than the prototypes were the people building them. “The projects are the vehicle,” she says, “but the important thing is the passengers.”
Social Entrepreneurship
For many of the participants this year—undergraduates and graduate students from Ghana, the United States, and elsewhere, who are studying subjects as diverse as architecture, international relations, engineering, and business—the experience was eye-opening. At the beginning of the summit, participants were broken into teams, each of which was tasked with working collaboratively with people in nearby villages to design a product and come up with a business model to respond to a broad challenge. The makers of the mosquito-repelling lantern, for example, were simply told to find a way of reducing malaria in children.
“There are so many parts in the process where you could tackle it,” says Rebecca Smith, who graduated from MIT in engineering in 2009 and is a design-summit veteran. “You could focus on reducing standing water, or you could focus on adherence in the treatment. We thought we could have an impact with prevention.”
In a country where malaria is responsible for more than 40 percent of disease, team members were shocked to learn on their first research trip to New Longoro, a village of about 4,000 people a four-hour drive away, that most people were relatively ignorant of malaria. Eventually the students found out why: People were often not informed of their malaria diagnoses at the clinic, nor were they told of malaria as a cause of death.
Initially the team wanted to develop repellents or mosquito traps, but members quickly realized that these products would be too expensive, and that people who didn’t perceive malaria as a threat would be unwilling to pay for them. Mosquito nets were likewise unpopular because they were hot and uncomfortable to sleep under—as team members soon experienced for themselves during their stays in the village.
So they decided to design a product that would combine malaria prevention with something that people valued in a village with only scarce electricity: light. “The idea was to combine a dual-function product, something that’s a mosquito repellent with something that’s desirable,” says Karine Yuki, an MIT engineering student who is originally from Brazil.
In their search to provide a mosquito repellent that could be diffused by the lantern’s heat, team members discovered that oil from the neem tree, which happened to grow abundantly in the area, is highly effective against mosquitoes. People even use it as a treatment for malarial symptoms, brewing the leaves as a tea—they just didn’t realize that the seeds could also be extracted and pressed for oil, Ms. Yuki says.
The team now sees manifold potential in the innovation: By creating a market for neem oil, the lanterns could provide a livelihood for someone in extracting and processing the oil. There is also business potential in selling and servicing the lanterns, says Ms. Yuki.
Corporate Inspiration
Each step of designing the lanterns, sourcing the neem oil, and exploring business and pricing models presented new challenges. The first prototype was made of bamboo, a cheap, durable, and lightweight local product, but people in the village preferred hard plastic because it would be harder for children to break.
Next the team struggled to find neem oil. “We went to the market in Kumasi to look at neem-oil products and couldn’t find them ... but did find neem-oil soap in the market, so finally we just dialed the number they found on the back of the packet and arranged to buy a few liters of neem oil,” says Rayshawn Whitford, a rising senior at Babson College.
In their research on pricing models, they discovered that people were more willing to pay for oil refills than for the lanterns themselves, so the inventors are now talking about a “Gillette model” of selling the lantern at a lower cost and recouping their costs through oil refills.
Many of the models used in the design summit are inspired by practices in the corporate world. “The challenge is to make use of those tools in a different context: How do you take a model created for Apple and use it in a village with this lamp?” says Ariel Phillips, who co-directs the Success-Failure project at Harvard University’s Bureau of Study Counsel, a student-resource center, and has served as an organizer of the design summit since its inception.
The summit reflects this ethos of social entrepreneurship—the belief that the market offers a more practical and sustainable tool than traditional aid or charity for improving lives in the developing world—that has lately transformed international-development practices. Influences include such figures as Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank, in Bangladesh.
The trend is alive and well on American university campuses, where students increasingly seem to hunger for opportunities to work in developing countries and engage with issues of development. “Students are always asking me about what is possible, in terms of careers in international development,” says Ms. Phillips. “Even I am an example of what has become possible that didn’t used to be possible.”
The summit is a cousin of MIT’s popular D-Lab program, founded by Ms. Smith a decade ago, which offers undergraduate courses focusing on appropriate technologies in the developing world, and includes trips to Haiti and Africa. When Ms. Smith was 6 years old, her family lived in India, an experience that left a deep impression “At that time I noticed a lot of inequality in the world, so it’s always been a part of me to want to change that,” she says.
Adapt and Advance
It’s a drive that clearly resonates with students. From its original batch of 10 students, D-Lab has grown steadily in popularity and now offers 15 courses each year. The first D-Lab class traveled to Ghana in 2005 and spent a couple of days in the village of New Longoro, a community whose contribution to the International Development Design Summit is pivotal.
Crossman Hormenoo, who manages the Intermediate Technology Transfer Unit at Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, helped to prepare the initial cassava grader and groundnut-shelling prototypes created by D-Lab students that the team took to New Longoro. Returning to the village a year later, Ms. Smith was amazed to find that people from the village had adapted and advanced the ideas and technologies they had discussed with the group the previous year.
George Fuachie, the resident Methodist pastor, who met Ms. Smith in 2005 and has been involved with D-Lab and the design summit ever since, says the relationship has made a difference to the village. “When I arrived in New Longoro, women had no work, and everyone was farming on a small scale,” he says. “Many have been interested in expanding their farms, increasing their harvest, and increasing their incomes, which means they are better able to afford schooling for their children.”
Meanwhile, Ms. Smith was inspired by a 2006 event back at MIT that brought together 55 students to work on building eco-friendly cars. She wanted to do something similar to co-create technologies for development. At the first two design summits, a handful of people from around the world, including Mr. Hormenoo, traveled to MIT and worked with students in manufacturing a low-cost refrigerator, a household water-filtration system, and other products.
In 2009 the summit was held in Kumasi. The following year, it traveled to Colorado State University, where participants focused on developing business-venture plans for prototypes produced in previous years. This year the emphasis is on combining all of that and paving the way for summits to be held next year simultaneously in several countries, including Brazil, India, and Zambia.
The event has spawned collaborations across continents and time zones. A handful of devices created in previous summits are now slowly moving toward commercialization, such as the Sheba Water Filter and a pump designed to get the right concentration of chlorine into water and communal taps.
In New Longoro and nearby villages in Ghana, teams from the design summit have been getting their hands dirty, learning how to mix cement and lay bricks, living in mud houses without electricity, pounding fufu (cassava) with the women, and cooking on charcoal stoves. One of the most important parts of the process has been developing relationships with people in the villages and experiencing life as they do.
“At university, we just focus on learning the technology. We don’t think about the needs of the people using the technologies,” says Chanthan Hel, a fourth-year electrical- and telecommunication-engineering student from the Institute of Technology of Cambodia. “I’ve learned that we do not need technology and money. We just need to know the needs of people and build something that is easy.”
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