permaculture

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lfl@intrex.net>]

<http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/gadgets_for_the_poor;_ylt=A9G_RxULcTxGI0IBXwphr7sF>
Tools for poor at NYC museum show - Yahoo! News

By DAVID MINTHORN, Associated Press Writer Fri May 4, 6:40 PM ET

NEW YORK - A new breed of industrial designer is confronting Third World poverty with innovative products aimed at 
encouraging rural entrepreneurs.

Instead of advocating aid giveaways with uncertain results, these socially conscious designers hew to the profit motive 
and sell their products to the poor. They say their strategy fosters dignity, not dependence, and ensures sustainability.

By creating simple, efficient gadgets for poor countries, the designers aim to provide Africans, Asians and Latin 
Americans with the means to generate cash on local markets.

Low-cost water purifiers, crop preservers, wireless lighting, drip irrigation and load-carrying bicycles are among the 
simple but ingenious products being mass-produced under the humanitarian design trend.

An exhibition of more than 30 such devices opened Friday at the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, 
turning the Fifth Avenue mansion's garden into a global village.

On view are shelters, water purifiers and monsoon storage units, solar lighting systems, a solar-dish kitchen, a pit 
latrine kit and two-wheeled transporters. There's even a hand-powered laptop computer, price $100, on display in one of 
the huts made of cardboard and plastic.

"Design for the Other 90 Percent," which closes Sept. 23, underlines designs for the needs of the 5 billion people 
across the globe who have little or no access to the products of wealthy countries.

Display sections focus on water, shelter, health and sanitation, education, energy and transportation. Wall boards for 
each dramatize the vast disparity between the haves and have-nots:

_"Almost half the world's population, or 2.8 billion people, live on less than $2 
a day," notes one.

_"Seventy percent of people in the developing world have no access to electricity in their homes, health clinics or 
schools," says another.

_Women in sub-Saharan African often spend "15 to 30 hours a week transporting water, firewood, crops and grains for 
milling."

Q Drum, a donut-shaped polyethylene container manufactured by a South African company, is helping solve the water 
transport problem. It can be filled with 75 liters of water and rolled like a wheel from the well to the household.

The designers in the show stress self-help.

"What poor people need most is a way to make money," says Martin J. Fisher of KickStart International, purveyor of a 
portable press that makes building blocks from soil and lightweight hand pumps to irrigate fields.

Writing in the show's catalog, he explains that KickStart insisted on selling its pumps because "no giveaway program can 
be sustainable. By selling our pumps, we create a sustainable supply chain."

Paul Polak, whose International Development Enterprises sells drip-irrigation systems in India and Africa, underlined 
keeping prices low. "Affordability isn't everything; it's the only thing," he writes.

Other products on display include the Big Boda load-carrying bicycle, which can transport 100 pounds of goods to market, 
a ceramic charcoal stove, a LifeStraw purifier that makes any surface water drinkable, and the Water Storage System that 
stores 10,000 liters of monsoon rain in a plastic bag inside a hand-dug pit.

Some of the products relate directly to America. Katrina Furniture Project builds tables, stools and church pews from 
the 2005 hurricane debris. Day Labor Station is a wooden shelter designed to accommodate Hispanic workers waiting for 
construction or gardening jobs. And Mad Housers Hut is a prefabricated shed used for Atlanta's homeless.