Photo by Chris Seewald, Stanford Daily

Several of us recently visited Stanford for a panel discussion on “Clean Energy in the Developing World”, featuring the former president of Peru and touching on such important topics as clean cooking stoves and distributed power.  While I applaud any attempt to educate people about the needs of the developing world, why do we feel compelled to dazzle each other with unimaginably huge and depressing numbers when describing what we are up against?  When repeatedly told that “billions” are prevented from realizing their full potential for one reason or another we can’t help but be overwhelmed – and that doesn’t necessarily help.  Often there is not consensus on some of these figures, and even the definitions are not clear – for example poverty is often defined as <$1 per person per day, other times <$2/day, and most recently the World Bank has established <$1.25/day as the new magic number for extreme poverty and says that 1.4 billion people are in that particular situation.

What really does measure a population’s quality of life best, so that we can use appropriate metrics to determine our path and then see our progress?  I believe that each and every family and community has a different combination of circumstances, and most would object to being lumped into a huge group and 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 Human Development Indices measure the right thing – since they place Bhutan in 131st place, just barely above the seriously challenged Myanmar?  In general, can any distantly assigned artificially constructed single number ever hope to get it right?

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).

Access to clean water is another one of the ways we measure quality of life in communities, and just a few days later I attended another talk, this one at the SF Apple retail store, given by the founder of Charity: Water.

Their mission is to provide water security to people (~1.1 billion is the usual count of those without) by drilling wells – and they go about it in a very no nonsense way that depends very little on the abuse of huge numbers.  Among other things it is the tools they use that impress me – they employ superb design and marketing methods to tap into giving population segments that may have become alienated by the stale world of charity-as-we-know-it… lots of intimidating global needs represented by staggering statistics and manipulative images, ample doses of guilt, plenty of large NGO salaries, and in the long run not much to show for it all after the foreigners have gone home.

They believe strongly in transparency – how do we know that the money we donate goes where it is needed and then, hopefully, makes the long term changes promised? – and they effectively use the media and popular networking technologies like Google Earth and Twitter (and anything/everything else that you can imagine) to alert their target audience to the need and their impact on it in very effective ways.  So how do they measure up?  It takes time to tell, but 1,247 wells drilled is not a bad start at all – making steady progress a community at a time.

Lacking reliable metrics for need, how then do we decide what we can realistically do?  Perhaps rather than intimidate each other with unfathomable numbers, leading us to set vast and unrealistic goals for the developing world, we can help people set their own priorities, community-by-community, and then politely offer our assistance.