Low-tech aid for poor

For three weeks this summer, masons and mechanics, farmers and welders, scientists and a pastor threw themselves into creating low-tech solutions to big problems that persist across the globe. Converging at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, these 61 inventors from 20 countries divided into multilingual teams, each drafting and tinkering a device of the team’s own making that may make life for the world’s poor a little easier.

There was no grand prize to be won at this second annual International Development Design Summit (IDDS), but members sometimes skipped meals and stayed up late - sawing, hammering and welding - to perfect and build their designs.

Soon, their prototypes will be rebuilt and refined in the developing world by artisans using locally available materials, and ultimately they will be tested by consumers who live on less than $1 a day.

The 10 teams constructed a wide variety of devices - from an inexpensive incubator for low-birth-weight babies to a rope system that could help craftswomen in the Himalayas get their products to market. Here are three of the inventions that emerged from this year’s IDDS:

Each summer, Americans fire up their charcoal grills for outdoor barbecues. In many developing countries, charcoal is an everyday fuel used with indoor kitchen stoves, but the smoke-flavored food carries a health risk. Charcoal is not clean-burning, and one IDDS team says the resultant indoor pollution has been linked to deaths on the same scale globally as those caused by malaria and tuberculosis.

One way to make charcoal produce fewer emissions is to pulverize charred agricultural waste - such as corncobs or crushed sugar cane - and pack it into denser briquettes. A $2 metal press already is available for forming charcoal, says Jessica Vechakul, an engineer from MIT. What is missing in the market is a device to crush the burned cobs into powder - so her IDDS team decided to build one.

Their prototype looks like an oversized mouse trap with a hand crank. The user spins the crank and feeds the blackened cobs through a hopper. The grinder drops the powder into a container, where it’s mixed with other ingredients into a cookie-dough consistency for briquettes. The simple contraption can crush 6 pounds of cobs in 10 minutes.

Now people who make charcoal from corncobs stomp on bags of burned cobs or beat the sacks with heavy sticks. When they empty the bags, the worker is engulfed momentarily in a black cloud, inhaling the dust, Ms. Vechakul says. Also, after a few stomping sessions, the bags must be replaced - a recurring expense.

“It is one messy job,” Ms. Vechakul says.

Bernard Kiwia, a bike mechanic from Tanzania, will take his team’s design to his home country. There, his job will be to persuade rural communities to use the hand-cranked device instead of cutting down trees for fuel.

This alternative fuel from agricultural waste might be cheap overall, but, as some rural poor see it, wood costs nothing but time and effort, Mr. Kiwia says. Unless they understand the huge environmental cost of regularly chopping down trees, those in the countryside have little incentive to switch to a cleaner fuel, he says. Getting the target audience to invest in the IDDS device appears to be the toughest part of the design game.

Video-game cartridges from the 1980s may strike some as quaint relics from an eight-bit era, but one IDDS team sought to convert the outmoded systems into an inexpensive learning tool for children in developing countries.

Computers are prohibitively expensive for many in developing nations, but televisions are common and could work as a platform for educational games, says Derek Lomas, the design team leader.

Earlier this year in Bangalore, India, Mr. Lomas strolled through a bazaar and noticed an educational video-game system based on the Japanese Nintendo Famicom, for which patents have run out. On a lark, he bought the set for $12.50. The generic system came with two game cartridges, a keyboard and a couple of controllers.

The cheap TV-based computer got his IDDS team brainstorming.

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