Design That Solves Problems for the World’s Poor - New York Times

It is a luxury right now to sit back and peruse articles about economic topics that interest me. Economic development has been a passion of mine yet I have not had the opportunity to share my passion about economic development with my current AP students. The AP syllabus does not cover this topic and the Lorenz curve is about the closest that my AP student came to learning about income distribution and poverty. This was not an authentic study of or discussion about effective economic development.

So, I was pleased to read the article by Donald McNeil in today’s (5/29/07) New York Times which highlighted a show at the Cooper –Hewitt Design Museum where designers displayed the products that designed to serve the needs of the world’s poor. These products were created to enhance the quality of life of poor people world wide. They were designed as products that would assist the world’s poorest people in climbing the “self sufficiency” economic ladder.

“A billion customers in the world,” Dr. Paul Polak told a crowd of inventors recently, “are waiting for a $2 pair of eyeglasses, a $10 solar lantern and a $100 house.” The world’s cleverest designers, said Dr. Polak, a former psychiatrist who now runs an organization helping poor farmers become entrepreneurs, cater to the globe’s richest 10 percent, creating items like wine labels, couture and Maseratis. “We need a revolution to reverse that silly ratio,” he said.

The designers created new ways to transport water, created human powered water pumps to enable planting during the dry seasons, and designed an apparatus to clean water for drinking as you sip it directly from streams, rivers and lakes. So many inventors spend so much time designing goods and services for the rich that if in this ‘new revolution” were to take hold, the world’s poor might just find ways to make themselves richer.

What I like about this approach to economic development is that it involves giving the poorest members of our world community the tools that they will need to become independent entrepreneurs who will build their own economic success. This is not a “give them some food to eat”, “give them a dam that they don’t need” or a give them some “charity” type of economic development. It is much more than that…The artists and inventors themselves knew that:

“Interestingly, most of the designers who spoke at the opening of the exhibition spurned the idea of charity.

“The No. 1 need that poor people have is a way to make more cash,” said Martin Fisher, an engineer who founded KickStart, an organization that says it has helped 230,000 people escape poverty. It sells human-powered pumps costing $35 to $95.

Pumping water can help a farmer grow grain in the dry season, when it fetches triple the normal price. Dr. Fisher described customers who had skipped meals for weeks to buy a pump and then earned $1,000 the next year selling vegetables.

“Most of the world’s poor are subsistence farmers, so they need a business model that lets them make money in three to six months, which is one growing season,” he said. KickStart accepts grants to support its advertising and find networks of sellers supplied with spare parts, for example”

Now that is the kind of economic development revolution that I want to be part of. For more information about a truly successful worldwide economic development program for woman, check out the Grameen Bank and/or the Grameen Foundation. Both programs combine the power of microfinance, technology and innovative solutions to defeat global poverty. They too put tools in the hands of poor women. The Founder, Muhammad Yunus just won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for his work and for his foundation. His work inspires me..

About the author: Michelle Close teaches AP Economics and IB Economics the Shanghai American School where she is also the CAS coordinator for the IB program. Michelle has taught in a wide variety of school settings for the last twenty years and truly values teaching, living and traveling abroad. Michelle has been living in Shanghai with her husband Kevin and two children, Maya and Cooper since 2006 and she previously taught at the Columbus School in Medellin, Colombia. She calls Boston and The Bay Area her home away from home.

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