[Stoves] Appropriate tech: naive perhaps but with some useful lessons learned, lest we be condemned to repeat them.

Tue Apr 29 14:33:20 CDT 2014

Dear Cecil,  Ron et al., 

Having been involved with the early AT movement in Sri Lanka and East Africa in the late 60's and 70's, I would agree that much of what was started, never really took root. We ran an AT center in Arusha Tanzania for 6 years ('76-thru '81) and even though it continues to this day, it never really reached its potential. We learned some really valuable lessons and I'd like to share them with the group as they have relevance in providing perhaps,  a broader view of the interpretations being offered, especially as they may affect the direction of the group in its own choices for extension. 

In looking back over that experience and others which followed over the past 35 odd years,    it was not all the hardware and innovations that came out even those developed in partnership with several universities and other technical institutions, which really mattered in the long run;  It was how well the innovations were adapted to local culture and markets– produced, sold and maintained by local culture in the real daily market  that determined their long term success. 

While our Kituo cha Ufundi wa Kujitegemea,  started some 22 small businesses --and several remain in effect today-- many more of our efforts dwindled, for unless the  effort was integrated to local market realities, the technologies were doomed to dependence upon donor or other institutional subsidy and through that, ultimately,  local and/or national political  interests of the day. 

Yet with all that said, the AT movement did start something of a new way of thinking about development,  where being encouraged to think for oneself in the then emerging nation states of Africa, was a new concept. Beyond just providing employment of the individual to achieve some metric as measurable outcomes for the donors rationalisations, it  focused on empowerment of local cultures-something rarely attempted as a large scale sustained movement, certainly not in south and most of colonial Africa. It accompanied the desire for self determination  as a fundamental issue driving the movement --something often sadly glossed over or missed altogether in the international  reportage--even to this day. 

Internationally such as Nicolas Jaquier's Problems and Promises of Appropriate Technology (UNESCO, late 70's) foretold much of this: It was indeed missed by the oft cited Schumacher, Illich et al. and without this fundamental truth as driving motivation, the AT movement took the same turn as many others in history: It quickly became usurped by technology for innovations sake with the attendant burst of media  in the US states and internationally. Like the whole counterculture movement, while it introduced new ways of looking at our own social and political mores in the US part of the Americas,  it soon fractured and dissolved into small pockets of die hard interests with little economic impact. 
Technically however the AT movement also offered us a glimpse at the same innovative spirit which drove much of our own US part of the American continent's (and dare I admit it as a US citisen, very likely all other culture's) development. More than a few of us spent time in the early American museums of Cooperstown the Henry Ford museum, and the Royal Tropical Institute and museums in the Netherlands and the  UK, relevant anthropologic studies, colonial engineering handbooks,  and missionary technical handbooks culling over what had been developed earlier, hoping to reinvent it and adapt it to local needs through use of local resources and skills. We were determined to in Edmund Burkes word's, "know your history, lest we be condemned to repeat it".

We did not repeat it, but  we managed to fall prey to something else just as damning... 

Even with the technology geared to local resources and skills, we failed to get the delivery process right: Enamored by a few technical  successes, we began immediately to build more pyramids to ourselves and our institutions, seeking that glamor over the needs and market realities of the innovation itself. Institutions like NCAT were formed, the Rodale press and Mother Earth news popped up like spring flowers. Mother Earth News even went from black and white to glossy color. 

Well intended and very helpful small institutions such as VITA, SKAT, TOOL/Eindhoven Technical university, McGill University,  GTZ and many others emerged along with the ITDG center in  the UK  started with a great bang but those without institutional subsidy, eventually found themselves struggling. The more they focused on pure technical achievement the less many of them succeeded in long term impact.  

Of course, it can be argued that AT and indeed much of development technical assistance borders on - if not overlaps - 
humanitarian aid and it is therefore above daily market concerns: 'Our good efforts  deserve  public support much as health care defense and roads and water supply…'

This school of thought, however valid for larger social benefit programs, works less well when it comes to intriduction of small technologies. The thinking goes that such as stoves, as fully tested,  much less those imagined to be developed, are like water supply,  schools and infrastructure, for the good of another –as a beneficiary: They need to be subsidised: They are not things that must eventually be sustained in the real local market and culture. The problem with this is that the smaller household level items such as the stoves,  require more intensive maintenance, training in use, and  promotion…on a sustained basis. Donors however, tend to have short memories and a generally even shorter commitment to projects…The tendency by most donors was– and to a large degree still is,  to want to complete the project and move on. Few are in it for the long haul;  Most will downplay the need for attendant marketing and promotion, assuming it to be an automatic consequence of on or a few local technical demonstration efforts.  (viz., build a better mouse trap and they will come to your door and all that). The AT movement naively assumed sustained donor support. The consequence of such naiveté was the ensuing collapse of the movement. 
Donors and development institutions are staffed largely by non-entrepreneurs and hence they fail to appreciate the need for such a budget line item as marketing and promotion. They still largely ignore this activity as a necessary part of the introduction of a new technology. (How easy has it been for any of us to raise donor funds for such?) 

At the continued risk of cherry picking the good points of the AT movement to rationalize its impact, I'd still suggest we all do have something to learn from it. The technologies will get better but its the delivery process  which needs to get better too. It's not about more institution building and center for excellence for anything whether in Montana or Wales: It about networks of excellence, widely diffused, catering to  individual interests of smaller, more transparent and  accountable, less posturised, image focused groups  aligned to — read, sustained by — local market acceptance.

To the extent that this newsgroup has created the volumes of technical information and product, through lively informed debate is a tribute to the very nature of the network concept. To me it appears that the extent that its members efforts are sustained by real time alignment to local market interests, is the determinant of their product's real long term cultural acceptance and their own sustainability. If we collectivize it through formal organization, institutions and procedures, if we pursue corporate and donor support for more than initial development and promotion efforts, we are indeed risking the same fate of the AT movement. The closer one remains to the realities of the person they are assisting the more likely they will succeed in understanding that reality and hence the potential viability product they are developing. 

There is a very popular if not now famous poster of the UN which shows a group of village women in a group discussion about a local development project extension effort: The caption reads: "Why should  we listen to the advise of those who do not have to bear the same consequences of that advice?"

By extension of that argument, the delivery process has direct implications to kind and extent of ownership, management and maintenance of the product or service being promoted.

to wit;  there appears a real distinction of interests here: One school of thought assumes that the market for the stoves is similar to that of the market for Apple's computers, the Tesla's or Toyota's: A kind if trickle down gently approach which works only if you have enough social and economic capital to jump on the train…Other than empowering a few at the top of the food chain whether local or foreign based, this approach of mass production from one center for sales to the third world may produce more stuff, and even may lower pollution (if one judiciously ignores the production and distribution footprint). It may even appear to be more "economic" if one thinks in the short term,  but it has minimal and even a negative impact on real human capacity development-- real empowerment— toward social, economic and hence political stability , as can be seen by any google search of the devolution of income distribution in said nations. 

The other choice is to try to engage the marginalized consumer, not just as users and purchases of product, but as active contributors to the process; Not jut as survey respondents but as producers, trainers, managers, sellers of locally based production etc.. That is the idea behind real  empowerment: Call it 'do gooder' naiveté'  if you will but then, what better model of development --real sustained local capacity driven development is there ?

Regards, 

Richard Stanley
www.legacyfound.org