As for local innovation, it think it very much depends on where. I've visited and lived in many communities in developing nations in Latin America and there's a distinct dearth of not just innovative solutions, but even just basic and seemingly obvious ones. Upon seeing and feeling this 7 years ago, I decided to dedicate my life to it. I'm hopeful that in the coming year I'll finally be ready to share what I've been working on to facilitate it in a more scalable way...
It was comical to see the celebrity "assistance" in the form of e.g., a music production studio + school set up by skrillex, neighboring areas where people lived in shipping crates with stolen electricity jumpered directly from main, and with water tapped off city lines and bucketted in.
They dont need djs, they need plubmbers, carpenters, and electricians first! Fires and water loss were endemic. Almost everyone lived off government assistance, stole / smuggled resources, and blocked traffic/protested when the illegal resource taps were shut down or a government job didn't manifest. The people who made money where they lived usually washed cars or sold trinkets to tourists or brewed bucket beer.
It goes deeper than that if you ask me. It's rarely about "helping" in a lot of cases in the first place, and there's no incompetence at play either.
Just look at food aid to Africa. You know, the campaigns with banners of emaciated African children holding empty food bowls. These aren't primarily about helping African children, but about diverting European (or American) oversupply towards Africa to stabilize prices in the domestic markets - and they all but wiped out African food industry. Simbabwe was known as the "corn chamber of Africa" but lost that in a matter of decades as the cheap food from Europe was cheaper than they could produce. Or clothing donations, these ended up as "mitumba" in Africa, and wrecked local supply chains so hard that, by the time the Chinese came around, there was nothing left to fight.
Because no one is willing to pay them for it and they have bills to pay.
He's teaching proper engineering with commodity parts and accessible technologies.
There's no meaningful/competent oversight. It's all just about feels and optics. And thus no real progress has or will be made.
Anyway, yes, I agree that competent and genuine people (who are extremely rare) ought to try to make a meaningful impact in the world. But there's generally more money in something else.
(one rare exception that comes to mind, though i haven't visited them, is The Ocean Cleanup project. They seem to be experimenting and succeeding towards the worthwhile goal of making effective engineering interventions for cleaning up waterways and oceans)
https://www.heifer.org/blog/historic-gift-from-south-korea-a...
I'm sure there's plenty of incompetent nonprofits out there, but there's plenty of incompetent for-profits as well.
Setting aside cynicism is one thing but what answers are there for skepticism besides the very common moralizing personal attacks?
When I see a lot of nonprofit leadership improving their own lot much more reliably than the people “they serve”, I wonder if the handouts are just being politically diverted to the best and most politically valuable promoters.
If UBI is off the table, competition for gatekeeping resources becomes a dark market.
> Since our efforts began in 1986, the incidence of Guinea worm has fallen by more than 99.99% to 10* human cases in 2025
Im not going to put effort into turning those other people in another country into a new cash crop for billionaires.
Years ago I remember reading an article about Russians making a living in the USSR. A man in a town wanted to mow his lawn but could not afford a mower (or maybe he could not easily obtain one?) His solution was a scavenged washing machine motor mounted to an old kids tricycle spinning a home made blade.
https://worldbicyclerelief.org/mechanics-of-mobility/
One product which I can still remember back from when Banana Republic was still an obscure and cool and independent company with a charming hand-illustrated catalog was pairs of slippers/shoes made in 3rd world countries where the sole was a repurposed worn-out bicycle tire.... Interesting inversion of the usual order of things.
obviously it's a different technological and economic today compared to 2005, but still, "the global poor don't need computers" is questionable just based on the fact that they are spending their own money to get them
I see what you did there
Buying and shipping X amount of Y to <country> is easy to calculate the cost. And it's a fixed one time cost. Perfect for PR OP, and humanitarian operation with limited budget and/or available work hours.
Teaching takes the most valuable resources of all: Time. And it's harder to predict how long (and therefor how much $$) it will take before having sustainable results. And it requires on-premise staff and usually to setup some building for the staff, for the teaching grounds, etc.
Tl;DR teaching can easily be 10X the time and money budget of a quick 'send stuff' operation. This is why these are usually big operation handled by big non-profit.
See for example https://oneacrefund.org/ [0] where they have a revolving loan fund.
OAF lends materials and teachers to farmers to make the more productive, by the end of the program they got productive enough to pay back the loan and OAF can lend the same money to someone else.
It's super capillary, with many boots on grounds and quality problems.
Embedded into this there's a good feedback channel: farmers who don't think are getting a good service stop paying back the loan. This allows OAF to go and audit what's failing there.
[0] The person who started also appeared in a podcast where they explained the basics https://foreveron.com/podcast/episode-035/
- platforms
- boxes
so if one can build a drawer box, one should be able to make pretty much anything --- it's just a matter of working out how to cut things to length/width and possibly reduce/adjust thickness and what sort of joinery one wishes to use.
See my top-level post elsethread for the metal-working angle.
Counterpoint: the bits of a bicycle that are likely to wear out or break are not the pipes that you can find just about anywhere, but difficult-to-make things like chains and bearings.
The counterargument is, of course, "but what's in it for me?"
Source: I've literally seen this with my own eyes
People who ask this have never gone above and beyond to help someone, expecting nothing in return save for the gratitude they receive. It's a damn shame.
These tools might be useful in war, weird remote situations or maybe when no capital/investors are willing to inject capital in some remote poor african village. But I can't see why any government that can borrow money should do that.
That said, I'm also disgusted by the fact this is necessary at all. We designed and/or let an inherently unfair game go on unimpeded and give the losers some scraps so they may survive and continue to play along with can only be called the naturally occurring and less entertaining variant of The Hunger Games.
Any changes to the status quo will have to contend with powerful questions because why build bonds with people you distrust? Why bother including insignificant nations in your decision process? Why not be top dog and trample everyone under your righteous boots? Why not exploit and generally harvest the shit out of everything in sight and retrieve resources for the absolute minimum you can get away with? These sound annoying and they are, but they are really tough questions and they demand a good answer. Just "be a good person" is not cutting it. We need systemic solutions.
In case you're wondering I have the answer: sadly I do not, but I am convinced a couple of you do so please enlighten me.
What do we care more about? The present? The current generation? Or future generations? Our children, grandchildren, great grandchildren? The perpetuation of human civilization? The perpetuation of human civilization with a set of values that that supports the growth and happiness of all?
That's the first question, right? Alignment. Sustainable alignment.
From there, it's all about sustaining those shared values, and minimizing risk. Build bonds: keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Or establish trust. It works out better in the long run; people don't usually Like to stab each other in the back Trampling starts cycles of revenge, and that's no fun for anyone involved either Exploitation prioritizes short term gain and screws you in the long run, more often than not.
Bike maintenance isn't a skill issue. It's an issue of specialised tools and hard to get spares. Talk to your own Grand parents. If they weren't rich they'd have had to fix their own bike, and they wouldn't have had Google helping them.
The buffalo bike is one that was specifically made for developing nations and the project prioritizes local assembly and repair, while the bike is designed to sacrifice weight and aerodynamics, instead offering heavier-duty parts like thicker rims, puncture-proof tires, high-capacity racks, etc. This bike has two chains to reduce the likelihood of a critical failure and an internal coaster brake hub which is more robust to the elements.
Your average low-cost bike isn't intended to be used in environments with rough terrain and high contaminant concentrations without regular maintenance, and especially older bikes with things like cup and cone bearings which are more susceptible to dirt getting in, thinner tires which puncture more easily, and nonstandard bits and pieces like derailleur hangers which predate the UDH standard.
The best bikes I saw were ones that a kid from a family could buy for maybe $20 in local currency and the repairability comes from the cheap cost - if something breaks down, you can find the replacement part from a spare bike that broke down months ago.
I'm thinking that in the west we either have very cheap bikes that aren't really designed for long term use, and more expensive bikes tend to use fancier parts.
Off the top of my head. Steel frame, can be repaired / modified with any old welder. Designed so it can be taken apart with the minimum of generic tools. Standard bearings, brake blocks etc (probably brake blocks that you can shove some piece of old tyre in).
Front forks and the crank require special tools to remove. I assume the free wheel assembly would be the same. I don't know if it would be possible to modify these to be serviceable with basic tools, the point is an African could probably work out how to fix a bike, the issue would be affording tools and spares, and availability of those tools and spares.
So basically just your average cheap crappy Halfords Bike-Shaped Object type "bike"?
"very cheap bikes that aren't really designed for long term use"
You want cheap and reliable, not cheap with a load of doodads to make it seem expensive.
You still have the problem that the bits that you cannot just knock up out of old Morris Minor steering columns or AK47 barrels are the bits that break.
I know one person who has legitimately worn out a bike frame, in 40-something years of cycling, and it wasn't me. It was a guy who rode his bike about 50 miles *every single day* and rode from Edinburgh to Glasgow and back a couple of times a week. Eventually it started cracking around the welds.