Long tail solutions for the real world

Two articles struck me this week on how to make a difference in the world. Technology Review's Young Innovator Awards has the story of the simple cooking stove that is changing lives in Dafur and CK Prahalad mentions three great examples in Strategy + Business, on what he calls the Innovation Sandbox.
[from Technology Review]

Lawrence Berkeley researcher Christina Galitsky, 33, wanted to find more immediate ways to help the world's poor. At a Berkeley meeting of Engineers for a Sustainable World, she met Ashok Gadgil, a senior scientist at Berkeley Lab who had interests similar to her's. Together, they began to look at crises in Darfur and in Bangladesh.

The problem they identified in Darfur is simple, and gruesome.

More than 1.6 million citizens of this Sudanese region have been displaced by civil war, with hundreds of thousands crammed into refugee camps.

They have to eat, and to eat they have to cook, and to cook they need firewood, but they have already stripped the areas around their camps bare.

Local women must wander for hours outside the relative safety of the camps to gather wood. This leaves them vulnerable, and international observers have documented an epidemic of rape by roving gangs.

NGOs have suggested better cooking tools could reduce the need for firewood. While there have been a ton of competing ideas--everything from clay ovens to solar cookers-- none of them had been tested in Darfur with any rigor. So Galitsky and Gadgil went to Darfur, partnering with aid group CHF International.

Traditionally, Sudanese women balance their cooking pots on three stones over a wood fire but lots of heat escapes.

As a better option, Galitsky and Gadgil looked to a simple metal stove designed in the 1980s by the Indian nonprofit organization Development Alternatives.

Galitsky held a demonstration in Darfur--before a large crowd, she set up the traditional three stones, the metal stove, and a mud stove popular with many aid groups.

A handful of community leaders chopped wood and stacked it into 250-gram piles.

Then Galitsky cooked three separate meals, so the women could see how much wood each stove used. "The stone fire used ten piles, the mud stove used nine, and the metal one used only four or five," she recalls.

Despite the metal stoves performance, the researchers knew it would need modifications to fit life in Darfur. So Galitsky interviewed dozens of women about their lives and their cooking duties.

She determined that the stove would need a windshield, to control the gusts that whip through the camps, and stakes for stability when the women stir their assida, a sticky dough that makes up most meals.


She and Gadgil also need to make sure the stove can be manufactured quickly and cheaply. But the technology shows promise. "We are very excited," says Maha Muna of the United Nations Population Fund in Sudan. "The U.N. and [aid groups] have funded so many projects on fuel-efficient stoves as pilots, but CHF and Berkeley Lab are actually carrying out the analysis we need to be able to determine what should be replicated." The Berkeley researchers plan to begin delivering test stoves to refugee families this fall; they hope to produce 300,000 by next year.

In Bangladesh the problem isn't food; its drinking water. In the 1970s, Unicef dug wells all across the country so that Bangladeshis could stop drinking contaminated surface water.

The aid groups motives were pure, but the wells were not. Most were in areas with high concentrations of arsenic--in some cases, more than 100 times the level the World Health Organization has deemed safe. "It has been called potentially the largest mass poisoning in the history of the world," Galitsky says.

Recently, the US lowered its own limit on arsenic in drinking water by 80 percent, and states are interested in new technologies to meet the tougher standard--interested, and putting up money.

Gadgil and Galitsky saw an opportunity. With a $250,000 grant from the California Energy Commission and $100,000 from the American Waterworks Association Research Foundation, they are developing a filtration system that could work both here and abroad.

Arsenic is easy to filter at a big water-treatment facility, but engineers can't scale existing technologies down enough to serve individual families, or make them cheap enough for the poor world.

Gadgil had an idea. Iron particles act like arsenic magnets, bonding tightly to the arsenic for easy disposal; but a filter made of pure iron powder would be prohibitively expensive. Layering a thin coat of iron onto waste ash from coal-fired power plants, however, would offer similar arsenic--attracting surface area at a fraction of the cost.

Getting the ash and the iron to stick together turned out to be a challenge. But after a dozen failed attempts, Galitsky and Gadgil came upon the solution: washing the iron-coated ash particles with lye and letting them get good and rusty.

The result, which looks something like dark curry powder, will capture nearly all the arsenic in a beaker of contaminated water. The researchers still need to figure out how water should pass through their hybrid ash-and-iron substrate, and what real-world conditions might interfere with its performance. But they believe filters made with their new medium could be effective enough to meet stringent safety standards yet still affordable enough to sell to Bangladeshi households.

With Galitsky and Gadgil's method, a family could filter a years worth of water for less than about $2; it would cost at least $58 with today's cheapest comparable technology. Galitsky talks about all her research with a real sense of urgency, and not just because people and the environment are suffering. For the problems she is addressing, big gains are tantalizingly close, and the rewards will be great--for the poor communities this kind of science can help, and for Galitsky as well.

"I felt so helpless," she says. "And I still feel helpless. But at least now I'm doing something."

MORE.
Another story.

Consultant and author CK Prahalad speaks about healthcare solutions to serve the bottom-of-the-pyramid.His three examples are: the Jaipur Foot, a low-cost prosthetic, the Aravind Eye Care system, the world’s largest provider of cataract surgery and Narayana Hrudayalaya cardiac care center, located in Bangalore, one of the world’s largest providers of heart surgery.

He suggests the process for designing breakthrough innovations starts with the identification of four conditions — all of which are difficult to realize, even when taken one at a time:
*The innovation must result in a product or service of world-class quality.
*The innovation must achieve a significant price reduction — at least 90 percent off the cost of a comparable product or service in the West.
*The innovation must be scalable: It must be able to be produced, marketed, and used in many locales and circumstances.
*The innovation must be affordable at the bottom of the economic pyramid, reaching people with the lowest levels of income in any given society.
MORE.