Tag Archives: international development

Paul Polak’s Twelve Steps to Practical Problem Solving

Posted on August 20, 2008 | Leave a comment

Paul Polak is a physiatrist by training but has spent the past 25 years working to alleviate poverty in the developing world. His non-profit, International Development Enterprises, has come up with innovative low cost technologies that have improved the local livelihood of people at the bottom of the pyramid. For example the simply designed bamboo treadle pump has sold over 1.7 million copies and generated over $1.4 billion in farmer revenue in Bangladesh.

Paul has encapsulated his learnings in a book Out of Poverty that describes a number of these technologies. More recently, Paul has posted an interesting video on You tube that summarizes his Twelve Steps to Practical Problem Solving.

Some of the observations are commonsense ones but it is remarkable how often people forget them in their eagerness to push technology.

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Posted in Agricultural Development, BOP, international development, non-profit, Poverty, Rural Development, Rural Entrepreneur, Social Ecosystem, Social Entrepreneur, sustainable development, Water, Water resources

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7 Rules of Low Cost Design

Posted on August 11, 2008 | Leave a comment

I came across this article that summarizes Amy Smith’s philosophy of design for low cost solutions

Here are her 7 key points. You can read the entire article on Popular Mechanics.

  1. Try living for a week on $2 a day.
  2. Listen to the right people.
  3. Do the hard work needed to find a simple solution.
  4. Create “transparent” technologies
  5. Make it inexpensive.
  6. If you want to make something 10 times cheaper, remove 90 percent of the material
  7. Provide skills, not just finished technologies.

Some of Amy’s inventions and designs are also described with diagrams in another article Small, Low-Tech Inventions for Big, World-Changing Problems on their website. Amy is an editorial advisor for Popular Mechanics.

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Posted in BOP, Education, international development, Poverty, Rural Development, Social Ecosystem, social Innovation, sustainable development

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International Development Design Summit

Posted on August 8, 2008 | Leave a comment

Yesterday I attended the final presentation of the International Development Design Summit at MIT – the brainchild of Amy Smith, MacArthur Fellow and lecturer in MIT’s Mechanical Engineering department. This, now yearly, event brought together nearly 60 students from 20 countries around the world to work together with a team of mentors and staff to tackle a number of design problems facing NGOs and non-profits in developing countries. Continue reading →

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Posted in Agricultural Development, BOP, Education, international development, Poverty, Rural Development, Social Ecosystem, Social Entrepreneur, sustainable development

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BAIF Development Research Foundation – Sustainable Development To Support Rural Families

Posted on June 27, 2008 | Leave a comment

Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to spend a month in India and visited several NGOs while there. One of the innovative organizations is BAIF (Bharatiya Agro Industries Foundation) that originally was founded in a village outside of Pune, and is now at a number of locations in India.

I visited their operations outside of Hubli in Northern Karnataka state and wrote an article about their work for Lokvani.com, the e-magazine for the Indian community of New England.I have reproduced the article below. You can see some of the pictures I took on the Photos Tab of this Blog.

BAIF Development Research Foundation – Sustainable Development To Support Rural Families, Raj Melville, Lokvani.com, 06/12/2008

The dry ground, baked hard and crumbling, stretches out all the way to the horizon as we rattle along in a Sumo 4-wheeler a half hour out of Hubli in Karnataka State. A few scrawny bushes, struggling against the wind and heat, dot the landscape. Our host, Dr. Bhat from BAIF, points out some of the geographical features as we pass through several villages, each one smaller than the previous one. Finally we pull over in front of a compound and hop off as Dr. Bhat proudly points out the cluster of buildings that are BAIF’s rural training center.

Continue reading →

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Posted in Agricultural Development, Rural Development, Rural Entrepreneur, Water, Water resources

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An Introduction

Posted on June 22, 2008 | Leave a comment

The Social Ecosystem

Exploring Entrepreneurial Ideas that Address Social Issues, Enhance the Environment, Sustain Development and Transform the Developing World

This blog is about innovators that are addressing social challenges with fresh ideas, new approaches, and innovative business and entrepreneurial models. These breakthroughs come from a variety of sources ranging from academics, traditional non-profits to for-profit organizations. These include new approaches to charitable giving that have changed the way organizations address social issues. In addition to major changes at traditional philanthropies, they include newer sources of funds ranging from venture philanthropists to socially responsible funds that look for both social and financial returns.

This is an exciting and growing area that impacts us locally as well as internationally. We hope this blog will help educate, explain and engage you with these organizations that are doing exciting work around the world. We will use this blog to:

  • Showcase local and international organizations that have built scalable organizations and are doing significant work impacting social issues.
  • Highlight new approaches to philanthropy and support that are changing the way people address major societal problems.
  • Discuss new business ideas and models that are addressing key issues while providing both economic and social returns on their investments.
  • Present emerging ideas from the rich local pool of social entrepreneurial talent and enable the community to connect and support them.

We look forward to hearing from you about interesting social innovations that you might have come across.

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Posted in Social Ecosystem, Social Entrepreneur

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