World Ark Magazine - March/April 2008 - (Page 11) Good Design Should Increase Income For Fisher, the most important function of good design for the poor is that it must increase their income. “A poor person has only one need,” he says, “and that is a way to make more money.” Paul Polak, a psychiatrist who founded the development organization International Development Enterprises (IDE), came to the same conclusion, which he calls “ridiculously simple and obvious,” after years of talking to people in countries around the world. They were poor, they told him, because they were unable to make enough money. As Fisher points out, most of the very poor are entrepreneurs already, by necessity. In many countries in Africa, for example, the formal private sector provides only a tiny percentage of jobs. The rest are part of a vast, informal cash economy, in which the overwhelming majority of people get along by doing handiwork and petty RULE#1: Cheap Is Beautiful, Too Another principle of design for the poor is that the product must be affordable. Polak discovered how important affordability was when he sold two kinds of lug wrenches to Somalian donkey-cart owners. One was a $12 wrench with a lifetime guarantee, and the other was a $6 wrench that would soon break. To his surprise, he says, the cheap wrenches sold “like hotcakes.” The reason, he found, was that the donkeycart owners preferred to buy a wrench they could afford today, to make more money for tomorrow, than a wrench they would have to save for, and risk going out of business from a flat tire in the meantime. For someone living hand-to-mouth with no savings, the short-term outlook is far more important than the long-term, and the more affordable option will always be more attractive. This rule of affordability applies not just to simple tools, but to larger pieces of equipment. Martin Fisher, after his work in Africa, went on to found KickStart, a company that produces treadle-operated water pumps that can dramatically increase the production of subsistence farmers. His reference point for the price of these pumps is the price of a chicken in the local market. No matter how poor a person is, Fisher says, “they can usually afford, once a year, to have a chicken as a treat.” By pricing treadle pumps this way, and manufacturing them accordingly, he produces an item within a farmer’s price range, one that he or she can buy without layaway or credit. And, says Fisher, products that increase income should be cheap, but not free. At first glance, this seems grossly unfair. If a person is so poor that it takes a year to save for a treadle pump, why not just give it to them? But simply awarding an item to someone and asking nothing in return, say Polak and Fisher, only perpetuates the problem. “To begin with,” says Fisher, “it’s not really fair. How do you pick one person and not another? Also, it’s not sustainable. It creates dependency.” He explains that people who buy or work for things tend to be much more invested in them than people who receive them as outright charity. March/April 2008 | WORLD ARK RULE#2: Efforts to provide people with things that they desperately needed—water pumps, homes, farm equipment—were simply temporary fixes, no matter how inexpensive, simple, or well-intentioned. trade with very few resources or help, and growing food on a small plot of land to help feed themselves and their families. Anything that broadens their opportunities to make money, even slightly, is invaluable. To many in the world of international development, that is a novel idea. “There is a tendency,” Fisher says, “to put on our socialist hats when we think about poor people”—to think about what we can give them rather than what they can get for themselves. But in Fisher’s and Polak’s experience, what poor people want above all is something that will help them help themselves. www.heifer.org 11 http://www.heifer.org
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