So, maybe I've missed something from
Ethan Zuckerman‘s post ‘Innovating from constraint‘, but doesn't ...
"2. Don’t fight culture (If people cook by stirring their stews, they’re not going to use a solar oven, no matter what you do to market it. Make them a better stove instead.)"
totally contradict with
"4. Innovate on existing platforms (We’ve got bicycles and mobile phones in Africa, plus lots of metal to weld. Innovate using that stuff, rather than bringing in completely new tech.)"
After all it's not in most people's traditional culture to talk via a mobile phone and yet that new technology is being used by people who walk miles each day to get wood to fuel the fire to cook. How did the mobile phone become so prevalent in rural Africa? If you believe Paul, that kind of new technology is against the culture and therefore not worth bothering Africans with.
I think the big thing to learn is that Amy Smith and Paul Polak (in the same article) probably hold the best secret ... essentially listen to the people who have the problem.
I believe the key to providing a better solution is to listen and also to not assume that people don't want something because it is new technology. It may be that describing how a mobile phone works would be very difficult to a person who possibly hasn't even seen or used a fixed telephone. But quite obviously once people had tried it out for themselves, the technology spread quickly across the continent. Being able to try a technology out rather than being "marketed" at helps, especially if the techology is a affordable, easy to fix and creates jobs and/or time.
The women in this video
cooking with solar ovens, having cooked a traditional meal with the solar oven (even getting to stir it) look positively happy. Perhaps because they can foresee that they and their children won't have to walk miles to get fuel for the stove, and that with that extra time they could do something else - the children would have time to go to school for example.
Sorry, didn't expect to rant so early on in the mission.
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