design for the other 90%

COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA Copyright Regulations 1969 WARNING This material has been reproduced and communicated to you by or on behalf of Swinburne University of Technology pursuant to Part VB of the Copyright Act 1968 (the Act). The material in this communication may be subject to copyright under the Act. Any further reproduction or communication of this material by you may be the subject of copyright protection under the Act. Do not remove this notice. Ninety-five percent of t he world's designers focus all of their efforts on developing products and services exclusively for the richest ten percent of the world's customers . Nothing less than a revolution in design is needed to reach the other ninety percent. Transport enginee rs work hard to create elegant shapes for modern cars while the majority of people in the world can only dream about buying a used bicycle. As deSigners make products ever more stylish, efficient, and durable, their products' prices go up, but people with money are both able and wi lling to pay. In contrast, the poor in developing coun­ tries-who outnumber their rich counterparts by twenty to one-have only pennies to spend on hundreds of critical necessities. They are ready and willing to make any reason­ able compromise in quality for the sake of affordability, but again and again, nothing is available in the marketplace that meets their needs. The fact that the work of most modern designers has almost no impact on most of the people in the world is not lost on those entering the field. Bernard Amadei, an engi­ neering professor at the Univers ity of Colorado in Boulder, tells me that engineering students all over the United States are flocking to take advantage of opportunities made available by organizations like Engineers Without Borders to work on problems such as designing and build­ ing affordable rural water-supply systems in poor coun­ tries. If students can make meaningful contributions in designing specifically for 6. A micro-sprinkler in use on poor customers, why do a small-plot farm in Nepal. designers continue to Ignore thiS area? Is It because It IS much more dlfflcul[ PAUL POLAK than designing products for rich customers? I s It because they perceive that [here IS no money w be made? I do not agree. HOW COMPLICATED IS IT TO DESIGN FOR THE PDORP You do not need a degree in engineering or architecture to learn how to talk and listen to poor people as customers. I have been doing it for more than twenty years. The things they need are so simple and so obvious, it is relatively easy to come up w ith new income-generating products that they are happy to pay for . But they have to be affordable. Twenty-three years ago, in Somalia, International Development Enterprises (IDE), the organization, I founded, undertook its first prOject by helping refugee blacksmiths build and sellsoo donkey carts to their fellow refugees. However, in Somalia, there are a lot of thorns in the dirt roads they traveled on, and nowhere a donkey-cart owner could buy tools to fix flat tires. So I went to Nairobi, Kenya, and bought tube patch kits and lug wrenches. I bought quite a number of good-quality, British-made wrenches that carried a virtual lifetime guarantee for $12 each, as well as a few $6 Chinese-made models that would be lucky to last six months. I offered both types of lug wrenches for sale to donkey-cart owners at cost plus transportation . To my amazement, the Chinese lug w renches sold like hotcakes while I failed to sell a single British model. How could this be? After talking to a lot ofdon key-cart owners, I finally realized an operator could generate enough income in one month to buy ten British-made lug wrenches, but if 19 he did not have the money to buy a lug wrench today to fix a flat tire, hewould earn nothing and might end up losing his donkey cart. So he bought the w rench he could afford today to stay in business and earn more money for tomorrow. I have heard the same story repeated over and over by the poor people I've talked to. For the 2.7 billion people in the world who earn less than $2 a day, affordability rules. THE RUTHLESS PURSUIT OF AFFOROABILlTY Vince Lombardi, the famous coach of the Green Bay Packers, often said to his football players, "Winning isn 't everything; it's the only thing."With one wo rd change, the same sentiment applies to the process of designing products to serve poor customers: Affordability isn't everything; it's the only thing . I have to confess that I am a born cheapskate, so the notion of putting affordability first comes naturally to me. When I need an umbrella, instead of buying a $38 designer model in the department store, I opt for a functional black one bought for $1 at the local Dollarama, where everything costs a dollar or less. I know the $38 model would last a lot longer, but I also know that I would probably forget it somewhere within a month. If that $1 umbrella keeps my head dry for just one rain shower or, better still, for a couple of months before I lose it, I've saved myself $37. The rural poor think in much the same way, with one critical difference-they will kee~ that $1 umbrella in good working order for seven years, at the end of which it will have many patches on it and three or four improvised splints on the handle, yet still be usable. But the re is another big difference. To earn a single dollar, an unskilled laborer in the United States only needs to work about ten minutes, while his counterpart in Bangladesh or Zimbabwe must work for two full days. To learn how to come up w ith affordable products for poor customers in developing countries, Western deSigners would do well to start with a brainstorming exercise to come up with a serviceable ten-cent umbrella . HOW MANY ANTS DOES IT TAKE TO MAKE AHDRSEP Put you rself in the shoes of Peter Mukula, a poor farmer w ho lives along a dusty road twenty-five kilometers from Livingstone, in southern Zambia. If he could afford to buy a packhorse, he cou ld make an extra $600 a year hauling vegetables to the Livingstone market. But there is no way he can beg for, borrow, or steal the $soo it wou ld take to buy one. Can you think of a practical solution to Peter's dilemma? Let me throw out a crazy idea: What if Peter could buy a quarter horse? Not a purebred quarter horse, but a horse that is a quarter the size of a regular packhorse. Let's assume that you could buy one of these miniature horses for $lS0 and that it could pack sixty kilograms. Would that work? Peter would earn less money each trip, but he could gradually use his profits to buy more miniature horses. Once he owned four of them, they would be hauling the same 240 kilos as a full-sized packhorse But even if a horse a quarter of the size of a packhorse were available, $lS0 is still far more than what he could afford out of his $300 yearly income. To make it affordable, Peter would need a miniature horse that is more like one­ twelfth of a horse, w hich could carry twenty kilos and cost less than $so. Peter would probably have to carry another twenty kilos on his back to help make up the difference. After five years, he might be able to expand to a string of twelve pygmy horses. Only then could he earn the $600 a year that the packhorse he dreams of would provide. Here is an even crazier idea: Suppose we could invent a way to harness the remarkable strength-to-weight ratio of the common forest ant. An engineering class in Germany designed tiny weights that could be attached to an ant's back and determined that forest ants can carry as much as thirty times their own weight. (A human can only carry about double.) How many ants would it take to carry the same load as a packhorse? An ant weighs about ten milligrams; if it can carry twenty times its weight, it can pack 200 milligrams. It would take one and a quarter million ants to carry Peter's 240 kilos. A million and a quarter ants would come pretty cheap, but designing the harness would be quite a challenge. I have taken you through this imaginary design scenario to illustrate the central task of design for poor customers-coming up with breakthroughs in both miniaturization and affordability. The next step in the holy trinity of affordable design is to make the new product infinitely expandable. FROM FOREST ANTSTO THE ASWAN DAM If you th i nk the process of breaking a horse into twelve af­ Fordable pieces is complicated, try wrapping your mind around the problem of breaking the Aswan Dam in Egypt down into millions of ant-sized pieces representing the small farms that could be nourished by the wate r stored in Lake Nasser. Big dams like Aswan are built to provide an­ swers to the twin global problems of flooding and water scarcity. But when it comes to delivering irrigation water, extremely poor, one-acre farmers are usually left on the outside looking in. THE NAWSA MADSYSTEM You may be wondering where the term Nawsa Mad comes from; it is Aswan Dam spelled backwards. It addresses perennial flooding and drought w ith exactly the same strategy use€! by the Aswan Dam, but shrunk down to one­ four-millionth of its size so that it fits onto a two-acre farm and into a small farmer's pocketbook. Put another way, it is the ant to the Aswan Dam's horse. Like most things in my life, I stumbled into the Nawsa Mad concept backwards. In May 2003, I was interviewing farmers in Maharastra, India, who were using low-cost drip systems to make the water in their open we lls stretch a lot Further than the flood irrigation they had been using. 20 But the sixty-foot-deep, twenty-five-foot-wide wells that were the only source of irrigation water during the dry season cost 100,000 rupees (about $2,000) to build. Because they were so expensive, only twenty-five to forty percent of the farmers in Maharastra owned a welL The rest earned a paltry income from rain-fed farming and survived by finding work outside the farm. However, rainwater ran off their fields in sheets during the summer monsoon season. Could we find a cheap, simple way to trap some of this monsoon rainwater and store it to irrigate crops during the dry season, from March to May, when vegetable and fruit prices were at their peak? To create a miniaturized, on­ farm version of the Aswan Dam, we had to find ways to: 1) collect monsoon rainwater on individual farms; 2) settle out the silt and mud in the water; 3) store it for nine months with no evaporation; 4) deliver it from storage to crops without wasting a drop; and, most important, 5) develop the whole system to be affordable enough for a poor farm family living on $300 a year, profitable enough to pay for itself in the first year, and infinitely expandable using the profits it generated. Solutions for 1, 2, and 4 were easy. There are already all kinds of rainwater-harvesting systems in place that collect, settle, and store rainwater, and the low-cost drip­ irrigation system designed by IDE could provide the means to deliver it efficiently to crops. The critical missing link was an enclosed, zero-evaporation water-storage system for individual farms that was cheap enough to pay for itself in the first growing season. We estimated that a farmer could reasonably be expected to clear $50 from drip­ irrigated, high-value crops grown in the dry season using 10,000 liters of stored water. So we set a retail price target of $40 for the 1O,000-liter enclosed storage tank. This was a daunting target since the cost of a 10,000-liter ferro­ cement tank in India starts at $250. But we had already made progress toward finding an affordable solution. People allover India were using open pits lined with plastic to store water for short periods. This was not a solution for us because most of the wate r would evaporate over six months in such a hot and dry climate. But the lined pits gave me the idea of placing a fatter version of an enclosed water bag into a pit. Jack Keller, an IDE Board member and internationally renowned water expert, closed the circle by pointing out that the optimal surface­ to-volume ratio would be provided by a cylinder. So we came up with the idea of a ten-meter-long, double-walled plastic sausage in an earth trench (fig. 1). By u,;ing the earth for structural support, we reached our price objective of $40 for a 1O,000-liter storage tank. The fact is, of the 1.2 billion people in the world who earn less than $1 a day, some 900 million are small farmers who earn most of their living from what they can grow on their two-acre farms, split into four or five plots. Very few of them have access to irrigation water from big dams. Most of them live in climates with distinct monsoon and dry seasons, where affordable on-farm waterstorage and drip irrigation systems could enable them to produce income-generating, high-value crops in the dry season. AS3 DRIP IRRIGATIDN SYSTEM Almond growers in California invest millions of dollars in state-of-the-art drip-irrigation systems because they im­ prove crop yield and quality as well as provide a miserly way to deliver water to the roots of plants. My colleagues and I at I DE have come up with something at the other end of the afford ability scale-a kitchen garden d ri p kit that sells for $3 in India (fig. 2). Larger low-cost drip systems now sell for $160 an acre in India-on e-fifth the cost of conventional systems. The direct application of the bUilding blocks of affordable design made this dramatic drop in price possible, and low­ cost drip is rapidly establishing a massive new market for effiCient, productive irrigation on small plots in India and other countries in Asia and Africa. There is no need to maintain high pressure in the short plastiC pipes that deliver water to quarter-acre plots_ Cutting the pressure by eighty percent allowed us to cut the wall thickness of the pipes, thereby lowering the cost of material by eighty percent. The farmers themselves taught us how to make the walls even thinner and to provide a choice of wall thicknesses so they could pick a system that would last however long they wanted. We replaced expensive sand trap filters that prevent clogging with more simple and affordable filters, and we changed expensive high-tech emitters at drip points with simple plastiC tubes that did not clog easily. We traded capital for labor by making drip lines moveable from one row of plants to the next. Finally, a farmer could start with a 20­ square-meter system for $3 and expand it systematically to five acres by reinvesting his profits, highlighting the principles of affordability, miniaturization, and expandability I outlined earlier. Mohan Nitin inherited his family's two-acre farm in Maharastra, an open well, and a five-horsepower diesel pump. But the well could only produce a quarter acre of flood -irrigated vegetables in the dry season, when prices are high. Mohan and his wife, his mother, and his two daughters, aged eight and eleven, were able to survive only by finding occasional work on neighboring farms. Two weeks before my visit, Mohan's family invested $160 in an IDE Drip System for one and a quarter acres_ This was only about one seventh of what he would have had to pay for a high-tech drip system of the same size; nevertheless, his mother had to sell family jewelry to pay for it. She beamed as she told me this because she now be­ lieves her family's poverty will end. Mohan and his family have planted sweet limes intercropped with eggplant as well as a variety of vegetables, and plan to add inter­ cropped pomegranate. He believes he can earn more than $1,000 in the dry season alone, compared to the $150 or so he was earn ing before. 21 1. Trench-supported lOjooo- liter water storage bag undergoing test­ ing in India. 2. A $3 drip Irrigation kit. 3. A drip-irrigated plot located out­ side Harare, Zimbabwe. The dramatic drop in price for drip irrigation has now made it profitable for small farmers to start using drip on lower-value crops like cotton and sugarcane, and some of them are even irrigating alfalfa for their milk buffalos (fig. 3). I believe that low-cost drip systems like those developed by I DE will, over the next ten years, take over the majority of the world market for drip irrigation . PEDALING TO PROSPERITY This may sound like a large claim, but the enormous market potential for affordable technologies like IDE Drip has al­ ready been demonstrated in a powerful way. The proof lies in the phenomenal impact of the treadle pump, a simple, step-action pump that resembles a Stairmaster and can lift water from up to seven meters below ground (fig. 4). While IDE did not invent the treadle pump, we have reengineered it to be affordable for our rural, dollar-a-day customers. (On average, IDE'S treadle pumps currently retail for about $40 in Asia and $90 in Africa.) Since IDE first began marketing treadle pumps in Bangladesh some twenty years ago, more than 1.23 million units have been purchased and installed by small farmers at an unsubsidized, fair-market price. Using these pumps, many farmers have been able to double their net annual incomes, ensuring a better life and long­ term prosperity for their families. A$100 HOUSE What dollar-a-day people in rural areas desperately need is a starter kit for a 200-square-foot house that they could borrow money on or sell if they had to, and which they could build for no more than $100. Homes in the United States and Europe are getting so expensive, it is becoming harder and harder for people to own one; remarkably, most of the 800 million or so people in the world who earn less than $1 a day and live in rural areas actually own the home they live in. But if they tried to sell it, they would get no money for it, and if they took it to a local banker as collateral for a loan, tRey would get nowhere. This is because many of these homes are made of sticks and wattle, with a thatched roof and du ng floor, and have no value in the local market. Thei r owners have no opportunity to build something with real value at a price they can afford (fig. 5). 22 4. Bamboo tfeadle pump in use in Maharashtra State, India. But in every village, there are a few famil ies who have a hou se built out of brick or cement block and a tile roof, and these houses have both sales and collateral value. They accomplish th is not by building it a little bit at a time, because that is all the money they have to spend, and construction loans simply are not available. I have seen far too many designs from Western architects for refugee shelters and rural dwellings that look elegant to the Western eye and start at $900, which is totally out of the refugees' and poor rural families' price range. The no-value, stick-and-thatch home has a major flaw : it lacks a stab le foundation and durable skeleton . All we need to start a salable, bankable 20-square-meter home is eight strong beams and a solid roof that does not leak. Initially, this durable structural skeleton can be filled in with local materials, for example, sticks covered with mud for the walls and thatch for the roof. Then, as there is money, the stick walls can be replaced with cement block or brick, twenty-five bricks a,t ,a time, Access to affordable irrigation, seeds, ways to grow high-value crops, and profitable markets will speed up the home-building process . If, from the very beginning, the house is specifically designed to accept added modules, like a LEGO set, the family who lives in it can eventually own a house as big as they ca'n afford, When the bankable house is completed, the famil