From http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070504/ap_on_hi_te/gadgets_for_the_poor"
"A new breed of industrial designer is confronting Third World poverty with innovative products aimed at encouraging rural entrepreneurs.
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By creating simple, efficient gadgets for poor countries, the designers aim to provide Africans, Asians and Latin Americans with the means to generate cash on local markets.
Low-cost water purifiers, crop preservers, wireless lighting, drip irrigation and load-carrying bicycles are among the simple but ingenious products being mass-produced under the humanitarian design trend.
An exhibition of more than 30 such devices opened Friday at the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, turning the Fifth Avenue mansion's garden into a global village.
On view are shelters, water purifiers and monsoon storage units, solar lighting systems, a solar-dish kitchen, a pit latrine kit and two-wheeled transporters. There's even a hand-powered laptop computer, price $100, on display in one of the huts made of cardboard and plastic.
"Design for the Other 90 Percent," which closes Sept. 23, underlines designs for the needs of the 5 billion people across the globe who have little or no access to the products of wealthy countries.
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The designers in the show stress self-help.
"What poor people need most is a way to make money," says Martin J. Fisher of KickStart International, purveyor of a portable press that makes building blocks from soil and lightweight hand pumps to irrigate fields.
Writing in the show's catalog, he explains that KickStart insisted on selling its pumps because "no giveaway program can be sustainable. By selling our pumps, we create a sustainable supply chain."
Paul Polak, whose International Development Enterprises sells drip-irrigation systems in India and Africa, underlined keeping prices low. "Affordability isn't everything; it's the only thing," he writes.
Other products on display include the Big Boda load-carrying bicycle, which can transport 100 pounds of goods to market, a ceramic charcoal stove, a LifeStraw purifier that makes any surface water drinkable, and the Water Storage System that stores 10,000 liters of monsoon rain in a plastic bag inside a hand-dug pit."
