Technical fixes

Bill Easterly recently posted the following table on the excellent Aid Watch blog.

African Problem to be Addressed	African Research Survey, 1938	UN Millennium Project, 2005
Malaria	“mosquito bed-nets …malaria control by the spraying of native huts with a preparation of pyrethrum”	“insecticide-treated nets…. insecticides for indoor residual spraying …{with} pyrethroids”
Nutrition	“…the African suffers from deficiency of Vitamin A”	“Malnutrition {is also} caused by inadequate intake of … vitamin A”
Soil fertility	“methods of improving soil fertility {such as} green manuring”	“using green manure to improve soil fertility”
Soil erosion	“increasing absorption and reducing runoff on cultivated land {through} the use of terraces”	“Contour terraces, necessary on sloping lands… when furnished with grasses and trees…{to avoid} soil erosion”
Land tenure	“… legal security against attack or disturbance can most effectively be guaranteed by registration”	“security in private property and tenure rights … registration of property”
Clean drinking water	sinking boreholes	“Increase the share of boreholes”

He concludes with -

All of the above seem to forget that technology does not implement itself. Technical knowledge needs people to implement it – people who have the right incentives to solve all of the glitches and unexpected problems that happen when you apply a new technology, people who make sure that all the right inputs get to the right places at the right time, and local people who are motivated to use the new technology. The field that addresses all these incentives is called economics.

Which is fair enough, but if you read the comments to his post you'll see that not everyone reading it agrees entirely. My thoughts aren't so much a disagreement as an observation that just as birds, bees and flowers don't need biologists in order to function, technologists don't need economists either. Sure scientists and engineers need incentives, just as priests and politicians do, but a detailed study of what incentives are most effective isn't needed. That's the great thing about markets.

Why hasn't Africa taken advantage of the technologies of the 20th and now 21st century? Beats me, perhaps it needs an economist to look into it. Though even I have a pretty good idea why the 1938 report wasn't acted on - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_Poland_(1939) and the like.

Website changes

If you've been redirected here from www.wepoco.com then welcome to the new home of Wepoco.com and Wepoco.org.

It's going to take a few weeks for everything to be reorganised, but in the meantime please leave comments on what you would like to see here.

Michael

Watching the future unfold

This year, 2008, has been one of embarassing inactivity from the Wepoco team. The failure of the UK Met Office to support our Ethiopia project, then Tanzania was, in hindsight, inevitable. Quite why we let it knock us back so hard and so far is hard to understand. Anyway it's time to move on and it's good to see that others are making progress.

Here's a wonderful story from the New York Times -

Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?

The premise of the work is simple — get to know your potential customers as well as possible before you make a product for them. But when those customers live, say, in a mud hut in Zambia or in a tin-roofed hutong dwelling in China, when you are trying — as Nokia and just about every one of its competitors is — to design a cellphone that will sell to essentially the only people left on earth who don’t yet have one, which is to say people who are illiterate, making $4 per day or less and have no easy access to electricity, the challenges are considerable.

Jan Chipchase is clearly very talented - just take a look at the wonderful photos on his blog. It's good to know that people like Jan are contributing to the challenge of bringing better lives to those at the working end (base) of the pyramid.

Another blog I'm watching, in the hope that more posts will eventually come, is Julia Kumari Drapkin's Eye on the Earth.

The future of weather forecasts in India

On Wednesday the government of India's Minister for Earth Science announced the District-Level Agro-Meteorological Advisory Service (DAAS) [press release].

"despite considerable technological advancement and improved irrigation facilities, Indian agriculture continues to depend on fluctuating weather conditions. Hence, there is need to have a system which can help farmers to take advantage of benevolent weather and minimize the adverse impact of malevolent weather. "

Agriculture everywhere is of course affected by changes in the weather, but this vast commitment by the Indian government to provide quality weather forecasts to her farmers may well bring really significant benefits within a couple of seasons.

wepoco 2.0!

Welcome to the new Wepoco blog.

Wepoco began in early 2006 as a few ideas, questions and friends. Today it's a small charity with a few more ideas, lots more questions and a few more friends.

This first blog post marks the launch of the Wepoco.org website where we hope that more ideas, questions, and friends, can join the Wepoco adventure.