Catapult kicked off 2010 with a new design session with Project Healthy Children (PHC). PHC works with governments and private industry to establish food fortification and supplementation programs that improve the health of women and children around the world. Catapult, PHC and Stanford University hosted a joint design session to review two promising technologies developed by student teams in Stanford’s Design for Extreme Affordability: a water pump attachment that doses out micro-nutrient during water collection and an attachment for milling machines that doses out micro-nutrient while grains are processed. From PHC’s website on the new initiative:
In the developing world, a significant portion of the population is rural. Villagers tend to grow their own cereal grains, such as maize or sorghum and mill the raw grains in small community mills. These community mills are typically powered by water or diesel/electricity and the cereal flour produced is consumed as a staple food. Community mills therefore present an excellent opportunity to extend the delivery of micronutrients to a large number of rural people through the small scale fortification (SSF) of cereal flour during grain processing.
In conjunction with our partners, The Micronutrient Initiative, Stanford University and with funding from the Ansara Family Fund, PHC is undertaking groundbreaking work in designing a program to broadly implement small scale fortification. Small scale fortification promises to be one of the most significant break-through technologies in reaching the rural populations where the need is greatest. The promise so far is unmet due to the health community’s inability to solve the social and economic questions associated with rolling out a broader program.
receives requests from a variety of organizations and individuals. Some come to us with little more than an idea, others have had their idea in the market for over a decade. Some are based within the small community they’re trying to affect and others have never traveled to a developing country. Regardless of the above, many organizations make similar statements regarding their idea. Over the years we’ve developed a healthy amount of skepticism for some of these statements. In particular, we are always a bit wary when we hear these five most common claims:
On a related note, a business plan that outlines first year sales greater than 250k I put in the naïve category. While the number of people in our world who lack basic needs is on the order of 2 billion, the lack of effective marketing and distribution infrastructure in many countries is a roadblock for promising technologies. Establishing and implementing a marketing and distribution plan is achievable, but is often a task more complex and time-intensive than the design development.
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.
In the course of our Startup Campaign, many people have asked us what we will do with the money we raise. The easy answer is, “pay the rent ($500/month)”. A similar answer is, “pay ourselves” – we’d like to start receiving a living stipend starting in the New Year. But both of these responses give an incomplete picture of the situation and to what ends the funds we raise will be used. Because we charge a fee for our services and because a substantial amount of our time and energy is spent on project work, much of our future salaries and operating expenses will be paid for by earned income. That portion of our operating expenses not paid for by earned income is covered by donations and grants – the more donations we receive the less we need to charge for our services. However, to say that donations received will simply go to pay our operating expenses is to oversimplify the value and importance that this money plays. In essence, donations are the leverage by which we increase our ability to bring life-changing products and technologies to those in need – the more donations we receive the wider the array of promising projects on which we may work. Allow me to explain:
