"A billion customers in the world... are waiting for a $2 pair of eyeglasses, a $10 solar lantern and a $100 house."
Interestingly, this article doesn't even touch upon the real challenge: It's not in mass producing these items at low cost; it's in gaining widespread distribution to those one billion customers -- across different countries and cultures, to thousands of groups of people each motivated by different things.
Motivation is key. It's hard to figure out what motivates people, and it differs enormously across cultures. You could have the most effective $100 house around, and you could even have a way of distributing the physical product to hundreds of thousands of people living in poverty. But what happens when no one wants to live in your house -- because, as it turns out, your house is foreign, not cozy; it just doesn't feel like home.
Does that seem like a silly example? It's not. The poor are not as easy to figure out as some people think. Understanding their motivations -- immersing yourself in their cultures and understanding what they really want, what really drives them to make certain decisions -- is the key to good design.
And, unfortunately, it's an aspect of good design that's not easily scalable.
Obviously, there are pockets where you can start and grow from. But saying that a billion people are waiting for $100 houses -- as if the only issue is designing that damn thing to get the price down! -- strikes me as not being the best way to begin a dialogue on poverty alleviation.
By 2050 it's estimated that over 50% of the world's population will live in "chabolas" - i.e. in semi-urban shanty towns with no formal infrastructure, yet still very close to major city centers. So distribution is increasingly less of a problem than you would assume, simply because population centers are concentrating at a very quick rate.
It's an antique method of thinking about these things, but one way to conceptualize "third-world" countries is that they lack a middle class. However, these aren't entirely "urban poor" people either. The movement to these poor slums also has a large degree of private innovation and some leap-frogging that brings millions of these new urban dwellers into a "pseudo-middle-class". They have cell phones, they organize informal water and electricity for their dwellings, improve them, and basically begin to see an slowly improving standard of living.
So, there really is a billion people who aren't well off, but not too-badly off to not afford a $2 pair of eyeglasses. They're working, and moving up socially, and this new class of people need affordable products. There's an enormous, growing market for this stuff.
By 2050 it's estimated that over 50% of the world's population will live in "chabolas" - i.e. in semi-urban shanty towns with no formal infrastructure, yet still very close to major city centers. So distribution is increasingly less of a problem than you would assume, simply because population centers are concentrating at a very quick rate.
Yes, I was only stating facts, and I really want to point out that if we want to understand what the world will be like in the near future, we have to understand what rapid urbanization and "mega cities" will entail - massive urban populations living in slums (chabolas or favelas, there are several terms).
Usually in these areas I just cite United Nations estimates - here are the facts from the UN:
For people who want to know the other "downside" of this massive urbanization, then here's a GREAT link to an article. This website also a ton of forward-thinking articles about economic trends with larger implications:
Not dubious. Just replace "chabolas" with "cities". The move to cities worldwide is well documented and not showing any signs of slowing down. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization and lots more in Google.
The poor are as easy to figure out as any other human being, they are not different from us. These are people laboring away in sweat shops and farms for 2 hours a day in hope for a better life. How is motivation a problem here?
The problem is that the current economic system is one of exploitation.
Interestingly, this article doesn't even touch upon the real challenge: It's not in mass producing these items at low cost; it's in gaining widespread distribution to those one billion customers -- across different countries and cultures, to thousands of groups of people each motivated by different things.
Motivation is key. It's hard to figure out what motivates people, and it differs enormously across cultures. You could have the most effective $100 house around, and you could even have a way of distributing the physical product to hundreds of thousands of people living in poverty. But what happens when no one wants to live in your house -- because, as it turns out, your house is foreign, not cozy; it just doesn't feel like home.
Does that seem like a silly example? It's not. The poor are not as easy to figure out as some people think. Understanding their motivations -- immersing yourself in their cultures and understanding what they really want, what really drives them to make certain decisions -- is the key to good design.
And, unfortunately, it's an aspect of good design that's not easily scalable.
Obviously, there are pockets where you can start and grow from. But saying that a billion people are waiting for $100 houses -- as if the only issue is designing that damn thing to get the price down! -- strikes me as not being the best way to begin a dialogue on poverty alleviation.