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Can technology fight poverty? Or does it usually end up ripping off the poor? Is technology the new slavery? Or are people who hold back new technologies in Africa and across Asia doomed to the dustbin of history, like the Luddites who smashed up new factory machines in northern England at the start of the Industrial Revolution 200 years ago?
Too often this argument gets to be about politics or sloganeering about one particular type of technology, whether GM crops or large dams. But if technology is sometimes bad for the poor and sometimes good, how can we find out which is which and promote just the good stuff?
Anywhere there is electricity there will be PCs
Let's start with the technology almost everyone says is good – digital communication.
There is a lot of talk about the 'digital divide' – how the poor world is being shut out of the race to adopt new information technologies. It's true up to a point. Go to any university department or non-government organisation in Africa or India and the first thing you notice is the lack of the ubiquitous PC on every desk.
But that is not the whole story. Out on the streets of India, you will see small internet cafés everywhere. Many of them are just a couple of PCs at a dusty roadside, hooked up to long cables to power them and with phone sockets somewhere in the slums behind.
But anywhere there is electricity there will be PCs. Even tiny villages have them.
And mobile phones are big business too. In many developing countries there are more mobile phones than landline phone connections. China has more than 100 million subscribers. India is catching up fast. Afghanistan, one of the world's poorest countries, had only 15,000 mobile phones in 2002. Two years later that figure had grown 40-fold.
And other modern technologies are leapfrogging into the developing world. In some ways, the 21st century arrived before anyone noticed that most of the 20th century innovations never made it!
Solar panels sprout on the thatched roofs of mud huts in Kenya. Amazon tribes record their fast-dying cultural traditions on DVD. Indian village women gather round TVs powered by car batteries to watch Sex in the City.
In digital communications in particular, modern technology knows no bounds – it reaches every corner of the globe. And the revolution comes so cheap. In India, you can buy a mobile phone for less than $10.
Three million African children die of malaria every year
But delve deeper and you realise that those absent 20th and even 19th-century technologies do matter.
The African girl watching the Teletubbies on TV may spend her days walking through the bush to collect water for her family from a polluted river. Her brother with his mobile phone may be one of the three million African children who, for the want of drugs taken for granted in the West, die every year from the bite of a malarial mosquito.
So is this just a problem of money, or is something else going on, too? Why do some technologies take off in the poor world whilst others do not?
This is a ticklish problem that seems to have passed by many of those banging the drum for Africa. Read the material being published in the run-up to the G8 summit on Africa and you would believe that technology, almost any technology, is what Africa needs. And that the West just needs to hand it over.
Tony Blair's Commission for Africa, which reported in March 2005, concluded that technology had a critical role to play in fighting poverty on the continent. It called on the international community to provide $50 billion over the next 10 years to revitalise Africa's universities and set up new centres of excellence.
It mentioned areas like medicine, farming, electricity and water supplies and sanitation. But it had less to say about exactly what sort of technologies would work in these areas, and why previous efforts to introduce them had failed.
Big Western-style infrastructures have failed in the past
Most African governments have missed the point, too. They want big Western-style infrastructures. Their shopping list, presented to Western governments through the recently-established NEPAD (The New Partnership for Africa's Development), is full of large power stations and dams and massive transport and irrigation schemes.
But these are just the kind of technologies that have failed in the past.
We need to discriminate between different Western technologies, especially when the aim is to help the poor. Many are over-hyped. Too many technologies are sold as miracle cures, but turn out to be much less. Marginal, if not malign.
Thus 'golden rice', a genetically modified version of the world's most popular food, made by Western corporations, is designed to produce beta-carotene, a pigment that the body converts to vitamin A. It was widely sold as the solution to rampant vitamin A deficiency, which is a big cause of blindness and death in the developing world. But it turned out to provide only a fifth of the recommended daily intake of vitamin A – a handy supplement, but no more.
It seems too that Western technologies reliant on state investment and extensive infrastructure, like power grids, water pipelines and health service provision, don't fare too well in poor countries, certainly not in Africa. Governments are usually either too poor or too corrupt to get it together.
Some Western technologies are bad news for the poor
We can play the blame game over that, or just recognise a cultural mismatch and find alternatives.
Some Western technologies are bad news for the poor. Period. They include those that require strict health and safety rules to be observed, like using chemical pesticides on farms. This just doesn't happen. Nobody keeps a count, but it is evident that millions of people in Africa, Asia and Latin America are made sick each year by pesticides and other farm chemicals.
There are also economic reasons why some Western technologies might not be right for poor countries. That's especially true for manufacturing technologies, says Ashok Khosla, founder of the Development Alternatives Group in New Delhi, India.
'Labour is cheap in developing countries and capital is scarce, while the opposite is true in industrialised countries.' So transporting capital-intensive automated manufacturing technologies from Europe to Africa is both bad economics and a social disaster. It puts millions out of work when what is needed are technologies that provide jobs and exploit local entrepreneurial skills.
Barefoot technologies are now gaining a foothold
Khosla's organisation works instead on finding and developing technologies that improve the lives of India's poorest and provide openings for small local enterprises. Some of his success stories involve innovative new technologies: turning weeds into biofuels; developing a hand-operated press that converts mud into bricks for low-cost housing; and a machine for turning industrial waste into cheap roof tiles.
Others involve reviving centuries-old Indian technologies that were abandoned as the country tried to industrialise on the Western model, like hand-powered looms and paper-making machines.
After decades being ignored by developing world governments and Western aid agencies alike, such 'barefoot technologies' are now gaining a foothold. The World Bank even awards prizes for the best. In 2005, its Development Marketplace Awards included: an eco-friendly pesticide developed in India, which uses a natural virus to kill caterpillars; a solar-powered oven, developed at a university in Costa Rica; and a method developed in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya, to turn charcoal dust into clean-burning briquettes for household stoves.
'Many slums are hives of innovation,' says David Satterthwaite of the London-based IIED (International Institute for Environment and Development). Local entrepreneurs know what is needed better than foreign companies and, says Tova Solo of the World Bank, 'They have nothing to lose by trying something new.'
Bee-keeping and mini-hydroelectric plants on small rivers; processing locally grown foodstuffs for sale in cities; making jams and turning mud into bricks; better cooking stoves and making soap from local materials; solar water-heating and turning weeds into paper – all are simple, affordable technologies that are creating jobs and promoting better lives for millions across the poor world.
Some Western technologies travel well, others don't
It would be madness to throw out all Western technologies as inappropriate for the poor world, of course. Some Western technologies travel well. The digital IT revolution is transferring with miraculous speed and generally good results. Organic agriculture may be another.
Once regarded as the preserve of the privileged few, even in the West, organic farming is now taking off spectacularly in the poor world, to the benefit of farmers and consumers alike, says Jules Pretty of the University of Essex, a leading UK government adviser of farming policy.
He found that 3% of the developing world's fields are dedicated to organic farming and crop yields are 75% higher there than on 'conventional' monoculture farms using pesticides and other farm chemicals.
Natural pesticides, clever mixes of crops, planting weeds that lure animal pests away from fields, and traditional crop varieties that grow best in local conditions – all are destroying the myth that the poor world can only be fed by introducing high-tech agricultural methods.
But equally, other Western technologies that appear benign and destined only to do good, don't travel so well. Right now, a billion people worldwide do not have safe drinking water, and more than two billion do not have safe sanitation. Disease and death spread as a result.
Simple technologies do better in poor villages
The UN's Millennium Development Goals involve halving these horrifying statistics by 2015. Western engineers are keen to get going and say it will cost almost a trillion dollars to bring in the pipes and pumps needed to hook the poor world up to Western-style systems.
But critics say the money being spent on Western kit is taking over investment that would otherwise go into simpler systems that would work a lot better, more quickly and more cheaply. The sort of technologies designed for poor villages in the developing world do better than those developed for 19th-century European cities.
Take the elephant pump, arguably the cheapest method of getting clean water to African villages. It is an ancient Chinese device powered by pedals, like a bicycle. Water is drawn from a well by plastic washers knotted to a loop of rope running through a pipe. All the parts can be replaced from local materials and, at £200, an elephant pump is one tenth the cost of conventional Western-designed pumps.
A child dies every 15 seconds in Africa from illnesses caused by unsafe water. And yet, an elephant pump can supply clean drinking water to each user for life at a cost of about £1. So far, 1200 have been installed by a group called Pump Aid mostly in Zimbabwe.
The ancient Indian technology of rainwater harvesting has spread from the hills of India to the plains of Kenya and the desert lands of Egypt. Communities are giving up on government promises to bring them water from giant new dams and are instead reviving ancient systems of channelling and collecting the rain to fill their taps and grow their crops.
In other instances, solutions developed in the West but barely used there may do the job. Take the 'Eco-san' toilet, the alternative to sewer systems.
Conventional sewer systems are not the right answer
Africa has a major sanitation problem, but nothing could be worse for the continent than putting water-flushed toilets into every house and sewers down every back alley. For one thing, where would the water come from to flush all those toilets? For another, where would the liquid streams of sewage end up after the flush? Most likely they would pollute the next village's water supply.
'Conventional sewer systems are just not the right answer,' says Bengt Johansson of Sida (Swedish International Development Agency). He wants instead Eco-san systems that collect sewage and compost it for recycling. They can deliver nitrogen-rich liquids to irrigate and fertilise fields, and ferment sewage to make biogas for cooking.
Some Western water engineers say that if they were starting out again on sanitation without our historical legacy of sewer systems, they would choose Eco-san. Africa has the chance to do just that, says Johansson.
One thing everyone can agree on is that the technological solutions to Africa's problems will require thriving communities of scientists and innovators in Africa itself.
Many African universities are moribund, ill-financed institutions built on the Western model and dedicated to little more than turning out government pen-pushers. Calestous Juma, professor of international development at Harvard University says Africa needs 'a new generation of universities. They must change to becoming engines of community development... working directly in the communities where they are located.'
In the modern world, a lot of things can be bought off the shelf. But often, there is no alternative but to find home-grown solutions for local problems.
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