Of well-intentioned tinkerers and hard-nosed entrepreneurs
The appropriate technology movement died peacefully in its sleep 12 years ago.
The reason, as Paul Polak writes in a sort of eulogy for the movement, is that for a long time, inventors designing products for “the other 90%”—consumers making less than $2 a day—were designing them to be too expensive. You might say they weren’t designing them for poor people at all.
Polak draws on a few colorful examples of failed products to make his point: a $110 solar lamp, a 3-in-1 farming tool. These were devices that simply couldn’t be made cheaply enough to sell well in the developing world: why do you need a 3-in-1 tool if it costs as much as three tools in the first place?
As Polak has it, these inventors were doomed by their failure to consider the “price poin for their products. They were “well-intentioned tinkerers,” not “hard-nosed entrepreneurs.”
Another way to think of it is that these inventions were doomed by geography. They were designed for the other 90%, and not the 90%. Almost by definition, the other 90% are people living far away, people living vastly different lives from the inventors in question. And so a key question that all inventors face — what do people need?— becomes abstract.
But there’s another category of would-be inventors that this analysis leaves out: people for whom the abstraction is not “what do people need?” but “how are machines made?”— designers and inventors without access to the manufacturing industry.
One of the most compelling appropriate technology stories in recent memory is that of Richard Turere, a Kenyan boy who, at age 11, devised a flashing light system to scare lions away from his family’s livestock. For Turere, the question of what people needed was painfully concrete; the families around him regularly lost livestock to prowling lions.
Turere is nothing if not a well-intentioned tinkerer—a boy trying to solve a local problem with scrap materials. Yet he had no choice but to build something “affordable.” Turere’s design used five flashlight bulbs, a car battery, and a solar panel.
In a way, he was lucky to hit upon an idea that was simple and relatively cheap to put into practice in a place without a manufacturing industry. There are probably thousands of useful devices that it would be hard, if not impossible to prototype in rural Kenya.
When it comes to bringing a device to market, even the most affordable designs are made expensive by the lack of infrastructure to build them efficiently. In this context, Polak’s distinction between “well-intentioned tinkerers” and “hard-nosed entrepreneurs” becomes irrelevant: would-be entrepreneurs are relegated to to lives spent tinkering.
Every few months, another teenaged African tinkerer makes international headlines for his ingenuity. Turere is only the latest: before him there was Kelvin “DJ Focus” Doe, a 15 year old from Sierra Leone who built his own radio transmitter, and before that, William Kamkwamba, a Malawian boy who built a wind turbine to power appliances in his village.
Each of them is now internationally famous. All three have given Ted talks and been covered by CNN. Kamkwamba is a student at Dartmouth, and Turere has earned a scholarship at a prestigious Kenyan international school. We can hope that such breaks will give them the tools and access to capital to help to turn their engineering skills into viable businesses. Still, there are surely dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of “well-intentioned tinkerers” like them, young people who may not have the opportunity to prototype their designs, or the hope of bringing them to market.
That balance may slowly be shifting. From Global Cycle Solutions and AISE in Tanzania to initiatives like the Victoria Innovation Center in Kenya, small scale manufacturing is picking up throughout Africa. With each factory, makerspace, or fablab that emerges, more and more well-intentioned tinkerers have the possibility of becoming hard-nosed entrepreneurs.
