Think creatively

think and act big – don’t do anything that can’t reach a million people

Assuming that all peoples on earth will need to modernize to prevent poverty and human suffering, a change in focus to the cities rather than remote areas would reduce the cost of implementation.

A city would be selected based upon it's relative abundance of resources relative to the surrounding area. If no city exists for a great distance from some remote village that is suffering, a new city will need to be developed via the investment to test a new technology at that location so that it becomes a hub for the once remote areas around it.

Real world experience of various technologies would be a great accelerator for promising infrastructure changes that 1st world countries need to fully implement and test before the most difficult decisions are made to spread the technology worldwide. The investment in those cities would help the hosting area even if better technologies come into being that replace the chosen technology for that city. The experience in testing various technologies will be vital to our own development projects so the research and development expenses will bear the cost for more advanced countries that are investing. The enrichment would be on both supplier and host city. There would naturally be a progression to the countryside. The USA was not built by first going to the most remote areas and solving the world's most difficult problems there. Money earned in the cities and suburbs will spread via the normal economic process of the indigenous people reaching out to new markets for their newly gained production capacity.

Tackle the problem of slow development of 3rd world countries creatively using an ever expanding list of new approaches. Maintain a comprehensive database which models each innovative approach and stores all known factors and measures. Routinely rate each approach which has been realized or thoroughly planned using "real" data for a specific city. Measure experience factors of successful and unsuccessful approaches in an organized way. The simplicity in this overall approach is that solutions will compete fairly where factors can be measured and compared.