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Development-in-a-Box

"Not Activism, Solutionism"

Imagine going into a devastated area with a box, within which is everything a community needs to rebuild itself... Development In A Box.

Development-in-a-Box is a term from Thomas P. M. Barnett, describing an A-to-Z system that is used to bring a post-conflict/post-disaster/post-whatever... up to working order again. What we're doing in this community, however, is discussing technology that would be a part of development-in-a-box. That is, prescriptive technology/methods/processes to be used in disaster relief, famine relief, drought relief, pandemic reliefs etc., especially focusing on rural (read: near stone-age) and remote areas.

People in the modern world seem to forget that remote areas don't have the capacity to build huge plants for, say, algae farms, and because large algae farms aren't competitive enough for the modern countries, they give up. But what they forget is that rural areas would love to have even small scale productions such as these, and, ironically, these remote areas are usually places with the ideal conditions for such projects! (Example: sub-Saharan Africa).

Guidelines for Relief Tech

Ready to discuss relief technology? Remember that this tech needs to be portable, self-powered, (and in the case of those things left on-site) easy to use, easy to fix, eco-friendly, reliable, resilient, and if all possible, inexpensive.

It's a tall order. I know this. NGOs know this. But think about simple solutions like Plumpy'Nut.

Many of the solutions are already out there, like algae farms. They can use salt or freshwater. It produces oil, oxygen, biomass that can be used in human and animal food (it's even a superfood) or used to make ethanol, and it eats Nitric oxide (NO), Nitrogen dioxide (NO₂), and CO₂ which are all greenhouse gasses from the burning of fossil fuels. But the solutions haven't been made in a way that is useful to the people who really need it: the folks in non-developed countries.

Make it cheap. (Not US cheap... Haiti cheap, Sub-Saharan Africa cheap, etc.)
Make it portable. (Assume no roads, no airstrip, no nothing)
Make it reliable. (If your iPhone breaks 200-miles from anywhere, it's just junk)
Make it simple. (If construction requires a back-hoe, forgetaboutit)
Make it repairable. (If they can't fix it with what they have, forgetaboutit)

Welcome, and have at it!!!

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