World Ark Magazine - March/April 2008 - (Page 12) And as Polak has observed, a system that subsidizes low-cost goods to give to the poor is vulnerable to corruption. Demand is much greater than supply, so the goods may go to people who have connections, or who have bribed the suppliers. Setting up a supply chain, on the other hand, creates jobs and is much more sustainable. There are notable exceptions to this rule— health care and disaster relief are obvious ones—but in general, says Fisher, if an item is going to be used to increase income, it should have a price. Scalability RULE#3: Another general guideline is one that Polak identified through his work in India and Africa. Too often, he says, designers still assume that bigger and fancier is better, and that throwing more money and technology at a problem is the best way to solve it. Instead, says Polak, items should be small in scale, small enough for a subsistence-level enterprise. But, he adds, they should also be expandable, as the enterprise A recent exhibit at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, “Design For the Other 90%,” explored how designers are turning their attention to solving problems for the world’s poor. OPPPOSITE: Better yields from new technologies bring more money and further development such as clean water, housing and education to rural areas. grows. In other words, they should be scalable to a poor person’s needs. To illustrate, Polak describes the dilemma of Peter, a poor Zambian farmer, making $300 a year, who lives far from the market where he sells his produce. If he could buy a horse, he could make an extra $600 a year. But a horse costs $500, which he can’t afford. What can he do? “Let me throw out some crazy ideas,” Polak writes in his forthcoming book, Out of Poverty. “What if Peter could buy a quarter-horse?” Polak does not mean that breed of horse usually found in rodeos and cattle drives. He literally means a horse that’s a quarter the size of a standard equine. “Let’s assume that he could buy such a miniature horse for one hundred and fifty dollars and that it could pack sixty kilograms. Peter would earn less money each trip, but he could gradually use his profits to buy more miniature horses.” Of course, Polak continues, the horse would be even more useful to Peter if it were one-twelfth the size and price of a regular horse, and he could add to his team as his income gradually increased. It would be even better, he concludes, if Peter could somehow harness the power of an ordinary ant and assemble a team of a million ants. Harnessing ants is nonsense, of course, but very useful in illustrating the principle. A lot of technology is designed for big, corporate-run operations. Take agriculture, for example; most irrigation systems and cultivation equipment are large-scale and expensive. But 80 percent of Africa’s poor are rural subsistence farmers, and their farms are tiny—two acres, one acre or even half an acre. A functional irrigation system can transform a small farm from a patchy, seasonal garden into a year-round enterprise, but until recently there was hardly anything available that cheap and that small. One of Polak’s projects has been to develop efficient, “miniature” versions of giant water-collection and irrigation systems for poor farmers, who can expand their system piece-by-piece as their income grows. The principle also extends to other material property, like housing, where a modular design that can be added onto, brick-by-brick (Polak compares 12 March/April 2008 | WORLD ARK www.heifer.org http://www.heifer.org
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