I’ve just read a good book, which has given me cause to reflect – “Fieldwork in Developing Countries” (edited by S. Devereux and J. Hoddinott, 1993 – table of contents here) is far from new, but then how much has the concept of cultural sensitivity changed lately? I single that topic out because though their collection of essays stretches from data collection methods to whether to learn the language or not (yes, if you have time!), the continuing theme that appeals to me is “How do we create the good rapport with the community that we need in order for our efforts to be useful and appreciated?” All of the authors are economists, interested in arcane information that might just disappear into dry academic journals. But even economists have to engage the people that they are studying so that they have confidence that their numbers are reliable. Some of the chapters are narrow case studies scattered with useful tidbits, and others are just treasures of generality. For example, in “Thinking About the Ethics of Fieldwork” we ask: are covert methods permissible? Instead of just asking/listening, are we allowed to also draw conclusions from what we see? Can we determine ability to pay from what luxury possessions we somewhat surreptitiously see in houses or from what treats we observe children buying from the local store (with their family’s scarce disposable income)?
We can always ask people any old question and hope for the best, but how do we ask in a way that does not suggest to them what answer we might like to hear – what should we expect when we ask someone whether they need a new cookstove? Or whether the smoke in their kitchen is the very worst of their daily challenges? Whereas Western cultures favor bluntness, many others have a natural tendency to want to please and will often provide you with the answer they think you want to hear, even if is an untruth (or more politely, a bending of the truth). Developing good interviewing techniques that account for those cultural differences is an important early step in working with a community. For example, you might focus on using more open ended questions or discussions – 
“Can you tell me about how you cook?” or “Please teach me how to cook with your stove.” Better yet, try to create your own learning opportunities. For example, I sharpen peoples’ knives and offer to cook for them (any way to get to spend time in their kitchen), while someone else may knit socks in public in order to engage people. Go collect firewood with someone to see how they interact with their environment; chop wood with them to see why their pieces are the size they are. Spend more time listening than asking questions and you’ll get a better picture of the problem you are trying to solve. One author comments that we should make the process as enjoyable to all as possible – “share genuinely of yourself, be prepared to grow together with people, and develop your sense of humor”.
Worth considering regularly is the inherently odd relationship between the foreigner and the local, and if we examine it even a little we see that there is a very strong tendency for observer bias to exist. Our research is not “value-free,” we all 
have personal and institutional values which can’t help but shape our work. Even our opinion of the meaning of “poor” or “poverty” comes from who we are and where we have come from culturally – the people we work with may not have much disposable income, so the choices they have are reduced compared to yours. However, that doesn’t mean that they don’t have the basics required for a happy and fulfilling lives. To us, a state of impoverishment means not having a job/money and suffering because of this, but in some parts of the world this might mean more time that can be spent with family and is not viewed as negatively. When we devise ethnocentric and probably arbitrary metrics and opinions (such as “earning less than $1.25/day is always a bad thing, invariably resulting in misery”) we risk drawing inappropriate conclusions instead of learning from our experiences.
People want to know why we want to wander about in their villages, and even live in them – an alien concept to people who may never leave their village, and often have little desire to ever be separated from their family. We must be prepared 
to be continually explaining to people (individually and collectively) why we need certain kinds of data. People also appreciate some back-story – what other studies have shown, what people are saying now, what is happening in this research area in the greater world, etc. All this is part of the general process of forming genuine relationships and making your work a collaborative effort. We also need to explain what our constraints are – e.g. we are not a charity so we cannot pay for everything or distribute gifts constantly. Gifts, if we are not careful, can take a relationship from one of equality to one of patronage. Most places we visit will have already had some experience with NGOs and their presents of candy/toys/electronics, so we have to regularly examine what we want to accomplish with them, and whether other ways of sharing might be more productive (music, demonstrating your talents, entertainment, etc.).
Finally, the process of preparing for a trip is never easy – you want to be ready, but don’t know what you need to be ready for. Have you done your literature review and contacted experienced people who might be able to help you in this geographical area or field of expertise? Don’t try and re-invent the wheel! If you are using a questionnaire, have you thought it out so that it hopefully results in reliable answers? What other formats have other people used (there are often examples online)? Are you ready to modify it in the field, once you have done a small pilot survey to make sure it is an 
effective communication tool? Role-playing exercises before you leave can often help you anticipate problems, so enlist friends to help you practice probable conversations. And it’s always good to prepare a vocabulary list, with local translations of words that relate to your project (sometimes I’m worried that I speak mostly cookstove oriented Spanish, since that is what I use most).
When we are introducing new technology and would like to persuade people to spend their hard earned money on things that provide “future benefits” – LED lights, solar panels, items related to health care or the education of their children – how can we determine how much they are willing to pay? How do you assign a time and cost value to an improved cookstove that reduces a household firewood budget? Are you prepared to ferret out how much people really value your new idea or widget? I recently attended a economist’s talk on financial incentives in the health field and it changed the way I look at how I ask people about what they can afford – I advise investigating ahead of time concepts like present bias (why the future is less important than right now) and incentive compatibility (and even the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak method, for determining willingness to pay) so that you can design your approach appropriately. For those of us who tend to be too technical, learning from those outside our narrow field – like from anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, economists, etc. – is hard work, and you have to do it before you reach the field.
How do people and communities change their behavior? We can do all the inventing we want, but if we don’t anticipate how people receive new ideas then we are probably doomed to failure. As soon as we leave, the innovations we brought with us to a community are out the door as well. Aid organizations and engineers working on problems have limited resources – both money and time are scarce – but the problems are innumerable so we don’t have the patience to work on things that don’t work. If we want more successes we have to develop better implementation plans, taking into account everything we can learn about what makes people tick.
innovations very deliberately so that they stick when applied to a new community or market. This requires equal parts anthropology and social engineering, as well as the harder sciences to address the technology (and some things we have to make up as we go along)? Too often our teams going to the field are made up of traditional engineers only – people trained to appreciate new products for the sake of newness only, forgetting that not everyone is like us. But what if others value innovation differently than we do? Our (first world) culture is famous for innovation. I find this to be a defining characteristic of life in these modern times, but it’s different in more traditional cultures. Imagine our distant forefathers eeking out an existence on the savannah; do we really think the serial risk taker was the one who got the most genes in the pool at the end of the day? The more I travel I find that it is more likely that they were the ones written off as a menace to the community well being – a crackpot with the least desirable habits.
Perhaps we need to try and correlate risk averse behavior with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Maslow speculates that people strive to meet basic needs, like feeding their families, before they move on to tackle more complex ones (like saving the environment). The ability to tolerate risk is correlated with security – represented by higher levels on the pyramid – which is distributed differently around the world. What if people with little disposable income don’t approach risk the same way we do? In our case we will borrow to the hilt on credit cards for consumer electronics we don’t need, then still take out a for-the-rest-of-our-life 30-year mortgage on a house. However in most other countries, borrowing is from families and spending beyond means is not taken to the extreme lengths that we see in the US. It is widely known that people save money differently around the world, with poorer people tending to save more, but what does that mean? Financial literature speculates that saving money is a virtuous activity and theorizes “risk averse consumers set resources aside as a precaution against possible adverse changes in income”; meanwhile our culture incorrectly assumes that our present level of income will always be there.
because purchasing such unfamiliar goods represents an unacceptable risk. We have to consider the implications of this mentality when we want to introduce “new things” like an improved cooking stove (perhaps saving them time and money, and improving health) that compete with the status quo – often just a simple ground stove fueled with free biomass. The “new thing” is sometimes just too strange. If you factor in the differences in the way people value their time – free time may not be such a luxury in much of the world– we find that even giving away useful goods for free is problematic! Of course the key to engineering change better is in more observation. Become an expert in your community’s problems and live life in their shoes. Collect some firewood, start a fire with wet wood, cook a meal over a traditional three stone fire… and definitely listen.
Its unfortunate that life is never as simple as it needs to be – it seems like that if a family wanted to consider buying a tiny turbine at X dollars, to decide whether it is worth it they need that power performance curve for it, decent information on their local wind conditions, and some idea how much electricity is worth to them (for example based on how much they are presently using and the cost for charging that car battery, or how much more they want to use – say if their neighbors pay them for charging cell phones). Now if we just knew the probable lifetime and annual maintenance costs we could start to understand the cost of each future watt-hour… what an exercise, and don’t forget that investing in all forms of renewable energy is tantamount to buying at one time 
characterized as hopelessly impoverished – that term they usually reserve for someone else, less fortunate than they are. Too often we rush to associate quality of life with those things that we are used to and value in our own lives, rather than listen more so that we can understand local situations. In the developed world, where cash is at the root of most transactions, we seem to need a constant flow of it to pay off the house, buy new cars, purchase food grown in distant lands, insure ourselves against unlikely calamity, pay taxes, put something aside for future expenses…ad infinitum. In other situations low income is not necessarily the end of the world – if only because most of these families also don’t have the consumptive lifestyle and associated debt that we do. The Kingdom of Bhutan wisely chooses to measure Gross National Happiness instead of depend on GNP as its measure of success and it considers itself to be a wealthy place – while conventional metrics might suggest that NGOs should be rushing there to “help” (50% of the population live under $2/day), I don’t imagine that most would be very welcome. Do even the more general 
Since one of the speakers had good experience in photovoltaics (PV), their application in developing countries was highlighted – it is commonly estimated that 1.6 billion people are without “access to electricity”, though this phrase is never defined. Too often we see that communities may be characterized as suffering because they are not connected to a full blown electrical grid, when I have seen that the first little bit of electricity is by far the most valuable and appreciated – used to provide light to extend the day for doing homework, power health clinics, provide access to information via radio, charge cellphones, and more. I consider distributed PV energy sources to be a good way to introduce people to the path of high quality flexible energy, and have worked with a tiny village (in Peru, as a matter of fact) where we use PV to charge LED lantern batteries and power some community services – just a few watts of generating capacity per family makes all of the difference in the world, and the cost of supplying this much keeps going down (while the cost of big electrical infrastructure projects keeps going up).
days later I attended another talk, this one at the SF Apple retail store, given by the founder of 
Saturday several of us visited Stanford University to attend a workshop preparing us for mentoring the 
approach that can make future systems more robust and user friendly, or for existing sites it is possible to revitalize them and put them back on the right track so that they meet the local requirements.
This was my third 