This is great! Please do more of this!

I am a current post-college student, who is 2 months into a 3 month product design internship at Freedom Technologies (http://www.freedomtechnology.com.ph/) in the Southern Philippines. An organization funded by Handicap International and US AID.

I support this program for its ideas on financial sustainability and the needs for infrastructure development. I am torn about the focus on environmental sustainability.

It seems to me that this is imposing the ideals of the already developed world, who have the luxury to be able to think of sustainability, on the developing world.

Thoughts?

This is nice, but what the developing world needs far more urgently are the big, ugly, real infrastructures: railroads, rural roads, canals, harbors, ports, dams, nuclear power plants, huge electricity interconnections,...

Without these, all the smaller initiatives remain problematic. We need to be highly modernist here: the developing world needs to be 'opened up' to world markets via large infrastructures, instead of 'contained' in a Western romantic 19th century vision of small sustainable and deadpoor communities of cute natives enjoying technologies made by them by some white Anglosaxon protestant aid worker.

It is good to see that big fat ugly infrastructure is now the top priority of the EU's Africa initiatives. It has just launched a €5 billion fund for intrastructure works in the South. This totally worldchanging.

I wonder... couldn't the technologies made available on the AIDG website be used in developed nations, too? ...couldn't, for example, suburban homes also make use of all this? ...very useful site!

I think you're on to something there, Matt. If there is any place on earth that really needs an Appropriate Infrastructure Group, it's the United States. Our infrastructure is as inappropriate as heck.

I think transportation would be a good place to start.

Cindy

Thanks all for your comments.

Joe, you write "It seems to me that this is imposing the ideals of the already developed world, who have the luxury to be able to think of sustainability, on the developing world." I would argue that it is precisely the developing world for whom sustainability is no luxury - low-income communities depend on their environments more than we do here in the West/North. Here at WRI, my colleagues have done great work quantifying the value of "ecosystem services" to the poor, documenting the ways in which environmental conservation actually fights poverty. Check out the World Resources Report for more info.

Matt, Cindy - you can do these designs yourself. That's the beauty of AIDG and their CC-ish approach. Just check aidg.net and you can download the appropriate info.

Thanks all for reading and taking the time to comment...I look forward to hearing more of what you have to say.

Hey folks, This is Cat from the AIDG. Thanks for all your comments. We're really interested in learning what you all think about our work.

First I want to comment on what Joe has said. I would agree with you up to a point. There does need to be more large scale infrastructure development (roads, safe building construction, water treatment plants, etc.) in developing countries. The problem is that a lot of this type development is centered around the capital cities and other large economic (usually urban) centers leaving the rural poor underserved for years, if not decades. Worse, as in the case of the hydroelectric dam project in the Artibonite River Valley in Central Haiti, the poor residents are displaced from fertile land AND still don't get basic services in the bargain. Large infrastructure projects are necessary but they don't tend to favor the rural poor.

The bottom line is that the people we are most looking to help have been waiting for YEARS. And even if a large infrastructure project started today and all the principles of fairness were observed, they still would not see the benefit for another 5-10 years. In the meantime, they desperately need access to intermediate technologies that will fulfill their basic needs, help alleviate their poverty, and prevent disease NOW.

Also we have no romantic notions of natives using cute technologies. What you are talking about is a legitimate concern with foreign aid, but you'll find no "white man's burden" mentality here. And just because we're doing appropriate technology doesn't mean that they are low-tech or low-quality. On the contrary, our ballast load controllers use printed circuit boards made in our shop. We're going to be looking at using white LEDs for lighting, etc. etc. We try to keep our designs simple so 1) they don't break, 2) they can be made/repaired with local materials and 3) they are affordable. We try to find solutions given the material constraints of our location and the needs of the shop's potential customers.

Also, and I say this with beaming pride, we start businesses using local talent. Our team at XelaTeco is Guatemalan through and through. I'm not sure if the AIDG shop manager is a WASP, but his Guatemalan wife might have a thing or two to say if he developed any delusions of grandeur.

Oops, my last comment was for Lorenzo. This one is for Joe. Sorry.

It seems to me that this is imposing the ideals of the already developed world, who have the luxury to be able to think of sustainability, on the developing world.

I want to expand on Rob's comments. In our experience in Guatemala, people are interested in sustainable and environmentally friendly technologies because 1) you pay for it once and get a relatively rapid return on investment, 2) you are not relying on technologies where prices are very volatile (e.g. the cost of gas or diesel if you are running a generator or electric water pump, etc.), 3)it fulfills a need at a price they can afford, 4) it is a status symbol, etc. etc.

This has been really important for us to understand. People are not interested in buying these technologies because they are green. That's just a bonus, and a small one at that. They are far more interested in all the other benefits the technologies provide.

So for example, we could say that buying a hybrid car would be a luxury, but getting your car to run on biodiesel or vegetable oil in the face of skyrocketing gas prices would not.