Why Western Designs Fail in Developing Countries 

Skibidi

Why do you think aliens slowed down their helping to people

I would like to know if a water tap can be conected to a garden or something like that?

a very interesting video, thanks for the info

What sort of child fondler edits video like that? One not smart enough to speak consecutive sentences without screwing up.

is dying from thirst better then being "humiliated"?

​@@alexmartinez-og8guthey had hand-cranked pumps already, the child sl4ve machine was unneccessary

@@mikk.t.7824 As others have noted, the extra weight that was required to make it a marygoround increased the inefficiency a lot. Similar pumps have been around for quite a while, but normally they are driven by animals being led around the circle. A much better idea would have been a battery powered pump with a generator built into the base of the marygoround. There would still be the cultural issue of kids there not playing on them, but if designed properly they wouldn't need to be on the marygoround when wanting to access water and other generators could presumably be hooked up to charge the battery. But, really, a hand pump or something driven by the wind to deliver water into a tank for use as needed would have been a better idea.

@@alexmartinez-og8gu except they already had pumps, mostly, or could have installed cheaper and more reliable conventional pumps. And a broken down pump will also have you dying from thirst. Also, child labour isn't about being "humiliated".

@@mikk.t.7824 Yeah, but that solves the water problem, not the child slavery problem. Seriously, it’s so hard to find children for the steel mills lately.

This was another thing that's very important that I didn't get a chance to cover in the video. Within any given country, there can be massively different communities and subculture.

i think it's not a question of "culture", it's just rich people don't understanding what poor people need.

@@Design.Theory Goodness, the amount of trouble I had at work trying to get people to understand that there was an inherent problem with “the address of your business”. Even _outside our own building_ in Silicon Valley we had food trucks!

Unfortunately, the issue is not exclusive to developing countries. It is not exclusive to being rich or educated, it is just context, and it is actually a huge problem with politics. City-people simply do not understand the needs of rural people and probably vice versa. It would not be much of a problem if the majority of voters did not live in cities and assumes that their solution's applicability might stop a mere afternoon bike ride away from where they live.

@@pflasterstrips7254 It's dumb people not being competent to accomplish the task at hand. Money doesn't matter. Rich people donate to these NGO's but it is the organization itself that is unable to fulfill their mission. Incompetence is a waste of money and charity.

Yeah, there seems to be this huge gap in what people think the developing world is and what large parts of the developing work actually is, and this video just lumps them all together and says things not designed uncontacted african tribes is bad design.

@@Carewolf And where is the lie in that statement?

​@@jasdanvm3845 that a huge part of the developing countries is a lot more developed than most African countries, so you can't put it all in the same bag

OLPC was perfectly capable in areas that desperately needed MORE laptops, not areas that had no laptops.

@@grantflippin7808 that's it, it was perfect for areas where the internet and computers were a known thing but only accessible to the upper classes. In this video he takes every developing country for an indigenous tribe without proper access to education or electricity.

Today the smartphone they are buying are in the $50 to $100 range because they are used. New are $300 to $600 in the Philipines.

Your final point is very good. Designers should go and live in the culture, for a minimum of a month but probably longer to get the inner view.

Negroponte nauively wanted to educate people through the OLPC project. Smartphones have spread everywhere, but what they have achieved is enabling communication, not education.

​@@ELmeinz And also payment/commerce, interestingly. And probably gambling too, lol.

Agreed - except Negroponti thought everyone wanted to 'learn to code' when the actual prize from widespread adoption of electronic devices is 'real time data about places I can't walk to today'

Agree. There are plenty of very effective foreign aid/international policy programs. But a surprising percentage of them are insanely wasteful and self-serving.

I think philanthropy should have the same oath as medicine, first do no harm. You're harming people by forcing things top down because you feel good about them. You can't force help on people, they have to ask for help first, they're still humans and have their own volition. I hate when people go creating policy and trying to force things top-down on others.

It is either that or given whoever in power resource to siphon the fund away from their people. Nations have enough fund to develop their own infrastructure. They just don't want to allocate those money. Truth bet told, should western nations stop doing charity and give out aides... the world wouldn't fall a part.

That's why it's better not to do it. You won't catch me doing that

that kind of "charity" is just a tax write-off and a way to placate the masses at this point. it would only take like .75 of one elon musk to eliminate world hunger. yet here we are, the weath gap widening like never before. really wish our governments would actually tax billionaires like they used to... maybe we could do some good in the world, rather than waiting for billionaires to get around to funding the projects we actually need, you know?

I don't have any kids, but I can only imagine how much confusion they would add to the conversation if I did... I'm a game developer, so for me working is playing (to stay current with trends) and making games on my computer. 😂

My little niece does that too. She pointed to laptops for a while and just said "work?" playing the name it game. I got her a cheap laptop (as in almost ewaste she's just a little kid after all) with KDE's GCompris built to be the only things launched for her, and now she started calling it a computer. She thought it could only do what she adualts did on it, but now it's also games

Once I asked my mom if there are any people who make a million dollars a year just pushing buttons and she said yes in wall street, on computers. I was like woahhhh and she was 100% right and it took 20 years to fully understand how that really works and how you can push buttons to make money buying and selling

That's a really good case study.

Okay, guess the situation: I am a millionaire who makes a living playing video games and I give an interview to an anime girl. Which btw none of us sees as a joke. (Well of course we know how hilarious that looks and that if we had to describe that to our parents 25[or even 15] years ago, they would have checked our rooms for shrooms and tested the water.) The anime girl also makes good money with that. Who am I? And what situation did I describe?

I've got a masters in education studies and people often times don't realize just how hard it is to design work that benefits from a computer for use in classrooms. I'm not really surprised that these didn't work so well in parts of the developing world as one of those computers is a massive amount of money. In some areas a single laptops is nearly the country's per capita GDP. So, for just a couple of those notebooks you could pay for another teacher or somebody to help design curriculum for the school that could more effectively make use of the resources available in the community. Or, you could buy more supplies for the school to use in testing and evaluation. Or any number of other things that could reduce barriers to education. Computers are great, but they don't contribute that much to education if you aren't already at a level of development where you have a reasonably stable internet connection and already have your bases covered in other areas. Much of the benefits that come from computers come from being able to connect to the internet and do research and actually see what various areas look like.

I remember 7 years ago, back in high school, my school obtained a bunch of Chromebooks which teachers could book to use in our computer lab. But after going there multiple times, we just took the time we spent in the lab to goof off like a bunch of 16 year olds wouldve, as the teachers themselves couldn't really think of a way to integrate the laptops into our classes beyond having us do Kahoot or make powerpoints

Same here. Our school district started buying Chromebooks as I was just getting out of high school in 2013-2014. They were terrible. Cheap and slow laptops that basically no one actually wanted to use. The wifi they were attached to was also shitty and slow, and in some spots, non-existent. Even the 3G hotspots on our phones worked better than the wifi most of the time. And I went to a high school in a middle-upper class area only an hour from Silicon Valley. But the district did what they always did: Go with the cheapest and worst bidder for short term savings instead of spending slightly more money for something that'll last longer.

I worked in education for a decade. I saw this over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over.... and the state and federal governments throw money at this stuff. Forget about having competent teachers, or sufficient numbers of teachers.

@@SmallSpoonBrigade i took online classes there is nothing wrong with them imo.

Makes you wonder why something peasants built in medieval Europe isn’t in Africa 😹

​@@chickentruckman Probably wasn't needed at some point or the climate conditions didn't allow for it. Like the cultures that didn't invent the wheel because their areas were extremely mountainous. My country never had water mills because we never had a big enough river, only wadis.

⁠@@chickentruckmanBecause Europe ransacked Africa

​@@tesso.6193: In the case of Africa, I'd point more at bad luck. First the Congo comes along every few decades and decides to murder anything successful with disease because the rainforest biome thinks human pain is delicious; then Europeans come in with some zero-sum-game economic philosophies (which we don't buy into anymore, because a 50 pound dresser is clearly more valuable than a 50 pound log of the same wood), then they have a bunch of other maladapted philosophies in local hands jerking them around by the throat. It's only the last few decades that most have been making direct progress, and at this point most other folks have been working through things for so long that we've mostly forgotten what we did as interim steps. The "wind charger", for example, basically _has to be_ reinvented everywhere because people have forgotten that they were a thing.

In Australia we used to have windpumps everywhere, then we realised that climbing a metal frame tower on a 40+C day to fix a broken mechanism at the top while a hundred thirsty cows stare at you just isn't fun. Also people who fainted from the heat while at the top of the tower tended to die. So now we have solar panels and electric pumps and if it breaks down, you replace it with a spare and take the broken pump back to the shed to fix. The old windpumps still dot the landscape, but very few of them still pump water.

I read this book in preparation for this video. I forgot to put it in the works cited because I didn't explicitly use any of the material from it. While I didn't cite the book explicitly, it was useful for adding some color/clarity to the ideas I mention throughout the video. I will cite it now.

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The olde “let them eat cake” story really, in another guise.

"Leaving politics at the door" sounds a lot like the "Call of Duty isn't pollitical" crowd that we have in gaming: A slogan to discredit changes to the status quo by claiming that only the disruptor is pollitical but not those upholding the status quo. Obviously, that doesn't mean using foreign aid funds for virtue signalling and ego building isn't horrible behaviour tho, just that focusing on needs is also loaded with politics. Which needs do you focus on? Whose needs do you focus on? How much do you trust various groups of people to accurately describe their or other people's needs? (In the field of foreign aid: Do you trust national politicians? County or equivalent level polliticians? Local (village or negbourhood) leaders? Or do you need a comprehensive survey?) Do you strictly focus on whatever need is stated to be most pressing, even if you think it's short sighted or unethical? In a corporate setting, do you only focus on user needs as long as it benefits the bottom line or do you push back against corporate interests and risk being replaced?

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I will def do more videos like this. Unrelated: If you've never heard of the song "Ocean Man" by Ween you should check it out

@@Design.Theory"ocean man, take me by the hand and design me a laptop a child can understand" I think that's how it goes? 😂

@@Design.Theory +1 total crackup. I went to create a software incubator and found people wouldn't live there, even for free, because it doesn't reduce their parents bills.

Here's an example, the lucky iron fish that add iron to the diet to supposedly treat anaemia in Cambodia. The story goes that they observed local culture and redesigned the iron block to a fish shape to convince the locals to use it. What is not told is that in follow up studies it seem like the locals didn't need iron supplement in the first place.

This seems to be in order of fine motor control needed. Suggesting the ideal machine varies a lot by age. Just like toys, obvious in retrospect. This also shows we have not truly solved input, we only have compromises.

That’s hilarious. The absolutely abysmal contextual thinking, I mean. People do not seem to think past a design perfect for their own environment. Like Tesla cars being unable to be opened in freezing areas, because nobody considered the door handle flush with the car might get frozen shut

@@DeathnoteBBexactly! Reminds me of Walmart installing expensive roofs that handle snow in Brazil 😅 They failed miserably here

Probably the best option for the pointer device would have been a joystick relative that uses a 2-d sliding device: you can seal them as well as you care about, stick a hole in the middle to stick a normal pen in, etc., and they're more compact than a trackball.

If they had used a trackball, people would just say "Look, it's a moving part, it breaks, why didn't they use a trackpad instead?" Or "the ball comes out and rolls away, ha ha ha, those arrogant designers."

I would argue that the cigarettes at least made the soldiers' life slightly more bearable

@@robob4465Food and peace would have been a better help

Yes, exactly right

Imagine the synergy if both appearances and actual value were combined.

HUMANS have a tendency to do that, I think, whenever they come from a place of sufficient privilege that they're not forced to pursue practicality for their everyday sustenance the way people- richer or poorer- do when they're in rough situations. But yes you're right and I Thumb up your Comment.

This is 200% true. I was a disabled specialist who was asked to be part of a panel to judge smart home technologies for a new housing project for those with a mental disability. One person came in who had lots of experience, who showed you could do more with less, who was respectful of the target demographic's privacy, who was easy to scale. A representative of local government rejected their bid because "it is not ambitious enough" and lacked "wow factor". In other words, "it isn't hype, so no funding for you". The biggest obstacle to improving lives around the world, is convincing politicians that the technology to help their people already exists and just needs to be implemented. They always want to be able to say they were a first.

People typically don't know their blindspots and biases. Lots of these people mean well, but have trouble overcoming themselves. Also, there's the damned of you do, damned if you don't scenario, like the case of the mosquito nets. Some people will use the nets for their intended purpose, so denying nets to the entire population will cause harm.

A push wheel is certainly more practical. Not sure about for water pumping in this situation but depending on the circumstances it could be. Say for more large scale operations like irrigation.

@@brainstormsurge154 not quite sure what you specifically mean by a 'push wheel' but sure, handpumps aren't very useful at scale but these were designed to be like merry-go-rounds, so you have to stand sort of sideways to push them, too--all around less convenient. they also weren't developed for use at scale (even if they came with water towers that were supposed to mitigate the 'intermittent playing' problem), given that they were meant to replace handpumps for normal water use (the real value of a pump is that it gets to water that is less likely to be polluted and can't be contaminated by buckets or whatnot. less clean water can be used to water crops in most circumstances)

The problem is that the task of fetching water is carried out by mothers, not children . Electric water pumps are the best😊

@@carkawalakhatulistiwa well, the water tower is probably also meant to mitigate this, since children playing fills the tower rather than fetching the water---it is just pumped to a place where it can be fetched more easily later (this is not how it worked out, of course; instead women both spin the playpump and get the water from the tower, as children don't play on the playpumps for the reason i mentioned above). as for electric pumps, while they might be convenient in some places, the limiting factor on hand pump use in rural areas is the difficultly of repairs and a lack of replacement parts, which would only be more of an issue with a more complex and fiddly electric pump, regardless of the power source used.

If the playpumps cost $14000 (see 4:38 ) a solar panel and electric pump for half that cost could do the job all day.

Accidentally based. That stuff is toxic.

@@keithlarsen7557 it's not. It's literally just full of sugar.

@@ForOne814 Yes, Toxic

@@keithlarsen7557 I don't think you understand what the word toxic means.

@@ForOne814 LOL reminds me of those people who call everything out in extremes. If Coke would be toxic it wouldn't have been a legal beverage for over a 100 years SMH

...Right. An "accident"...

Are we allowed to talk about that, now? I hadn't heard.

What I remember was that a well-known respirator manufacturer open-sourced an already FDA-approved machine design, and people were collaborating to put it into production.

That sounds like straight up just bad engineering...

That does often bring up a dilemma, how do you approach a cultural practice that is clearly harmful to the population (open latrines or worse, human waste all over the place is an awful vector for all kinds of disease, no matter how natural it may seem). Do you ignore it, knowing that you are perpetuating harm, try and work around it even if it's nowhere near as effective as the ideal solution, or try to get them to change their practices, and risk being seen as the arrogant westerner imposing their culture on the developing world. Of course a combined effort to get in roofing materials at the same time as building the toilets would have helped, but that still leaves the issue above.

@@Croz89 Good point, but again, that's viewing the situation with clouded eyes. In my example, they weren't just leaving droppings like deer. As I understood, they would go into the woods and bury it there. They were a very small population. - After countless generations of doing it, they already knew how to do it safely because they hadn't gotten sick from the practice. Regardless, the point is to ask what they need help with. Help with their most urgent need, then you can educate people and prevent dangerous or harmful behaviour. It's just wasted effort if you "help" by providing something they don't need or want. Education is maybe the most important thing for both parties. Long story short, help them with their basic needs, then you can teach. I friend told me once: You can't learn on an empty stomach or a full bladder!

@@peluso4oso Even so, "safely" is a relative term here. Burying human waste in the woods is better than leaving it out on the ground or in an open pit, but it's not ideal, there's a risk of contaminating water sources (which is why you have to be careful doing it when hiking). A small population might be able to get away with it, but it would certainly be more of an issue if the population grows. Some might argue that while leaky roofs are a problem, sanitation is more important than comfort, even if the community values it the other way around. It's a tricky balance between giving a community agency and preventing it from harming itself through bad decisions (even in the developed world we often have to deal with this!). This is compounded in the developing world with the usual accusations of westerners being paternalistic and "knowing what's best" for developing world communities. Of course the best thing is to do both at the same time, and in this case it seems like those who constructed the toilets could have left some roofing materials behind if they'd asked and known about the issue. But hindsight is a wonderful thing, and budgets don't always stretch as far as we'd want them to.

Rain is natural too.

@@Croz89 You cannot change a culture practices by visiting them once a year. No more than you can stop the obesity epidemic in the US by telling Americans that they should eat less sugar and exercise more.

They knew, it was just a money making scheme.

Right, that's like the first thing you're taught when studying design

Has nothing to do with design, they knew what they were doing and certainly profit from it.

Yes but other cultures have bias, history, and motivations that leads these types of initiatives. I would argue that if the infrastructure, and educational budget was there then ultimately it would have worked. Part of the trouble with free/stolen stuff is that it cost the reciever nothing, not everyone sees an alumium cessna engine as valuable aside from raw materials.

@@proyectoseducativoslz341vapid cynic answering to captain obvious.

That's why Windows 3.0 shipped with solitaire. It was a way of helping new computer users learn to use a mouse effectively as many people already knew how to play solitaire, so the added element was the mouse. You had to click things, double click things click and drag, basically all the basic mouse moves in one app.

@@SmallSpoonBrigade I used Paintbrush to teach my kids how to use a computer. It taught them how to use the mouse and they enjoyed drawing.

Yep. They want kids to code while there's zero infrastructure to use any of it in their area. I remember computers being put in schools during my primary school days, and no teacher knew how to use them, so they became the thing you typed on and played tetris on. They broke super quick, too, and were too expensive to fix for a village fae away from the capital. And this is in the Caribbean. There is a gap, but it's not that wide to jump. I actually went the Computer Science route after realising I hated accounting except for the computing part. But that's after learning how to use them and moving closer to the city where its an actual career option.

Yeah I think they forgot those kids are probably not playing, they’re doing chores and helping their families

It's interesting given that Seymour Papert himself was introduced to computing in the 1960s under fairly similar circumstances. To the general public computers were something you only used if you were going to the moon, and that might just as well be the attitude of the OLPC target audience. Not to mention as an African-American he had first hand knowledge of African culture. I think they would have had much greater success trying to replicate their own formation in the MIT AI Lab in third world countries. Forget $100 laptops, a $1000 one can outperform all the PDP-6 and PDP-10 machines they had combined for millions. Cost of the machine was never the issue. Human capital always is. Instead they should have gone to these countries and find young Paperts, Minskies, Stallmen, Sussmen, etc. and hook them up with their own labs with regular hardware at a negligible cost compared to their hand cranked fisher price shitshow.

Yes absolutely agree. There were some really clever ideas in that laptop. It's just that they were designing for the wrong context.

@@Design.Theory Yeah, we guys in the IT-field are often plagued by "pre-understanding", as Nicholas Negroponte (I liked his book 'Beeing digital' btw) in this case. There is even a meme we use to make fun of ourselves: "IT is the solution - what's the problem?" :-D Thanks for your video.

i remember in the early 2000s or late 90s if you complained about high system requirements for certain programs the designer would be like wait so you are still using a 2 year old pc ?

but was that due to OLPC or other advancements? Saw an article about a 128 TB SSD the other day. I could have sworn we were still dealing with stuff in the 2 or 3 TB range, I don't even know when it jumped all the way to triple digits.

​@@MorbidEelI know what you mean. My laptop Ram is 4gb and I thought those were enough (use for normal ms office and play 2000s game). Last week my office upgrade mine and they have 16gb of Ram!!

Both are right, imo. Clients often don’t know how much is reasonable, or even sometimes don’t know exactly what they want. Which is sort of where the second advice comes in. You make it a conversation and you gleen more about them as a person, and can infer what they want even if they can’t put it into words.

You have to start with letting the end user tell you what they need. And the general parameters for it. After that, you're correct that you do need to limit the options to not become overwhelmed. But that's more about limiting scope creep than it is about telling the customer what you think they need.

​@@Green__one: Yeah, the Ag advice was very much for an earlier step in the process than the Software stuff. The Software advice is what you follow when formalizing a contract, the Ag advice is what you do to gather info before writing the contract.

In 1993 DOS was very much still state of the art. Even in much of the western world DOS computers where still mainstream until the 2000s but admittedly then they where heavily outdated, but nonetheless very mainstream. Although admittedly again mostly in old registers etc. But 1993 they where still pretty hot. in terms of recent tech. Lots of people not heavily invested in recent tech still used systems that did not make it into current year.

DOS was a great way to learn about computers. Did it like that. Children are naturally curious when it comes to technology, it's mostly schools and maybe culture that destroys this natural curiousity.

​@@fgregerfeaxcwfeffece: By 93 DOS was very "state of the industry", but it largely wasn't any kind of "state of the art" unless you studied the actual API additions (and even then, it's unprotected roots held it back). Memory protection and GUIs were very much the state-of-the-art at the time, and while you could build such things on top of DOS, they weren't an actual DOS thing.

@@svr5423 "Children are naturally curious when it comes to technology, it's mostly schools and maybe culture that destroys this natural curiousity." "children", or you mean the children where you live? Don't assume all cultures have the same priorities. If kids have no tech in their lives and don't see a utility for it, they won't care. Playing kickball in the streets is real and tangible. A computer isn't if it's in isolation.

@@jasondashney I mean children. Not sure why you think other "races" are so genetically different that this wouldn't apply. Also why would you play kickball in the streets when you have access to a computer? That doesn't make sense. Sounds like you haven't much experience with children at all.

There isn’t enough data for Cantonese as well, a language spoken in developed countries like Hong Kong and Singapore.

​@tammyleung7578 Cantonese isn't used at ALL in Singapore, and Hong Kong isn't independent. There's more users of it in Guangdong, than in both of the other cities combined.

@@GWT1m0 it's very much used, just more of a family thing. Most dialects in SG is endangered. (at least for Chinese ones) Most younger generations, unless they have great-grandparents, they don't get to speak much of the dialects due to government policy of Chinese being _Lingua Franca_ , along with the other 3 as mother tongue, but it's not in the zero range like you have suggested.

@@GWT1m0 They didn't say Hong Kong was independent.

@@Hifuutorian Well by calling them countries it basically means it adds onto the implied meaning of an independent nation. That isn’t always the case but it usually is. Which is why the guy called out on Hong Kong being called that since it is classified as a special administrative region of China.

From my understanding, Mr. Beast just recently made a video giving people housing in Mexico, and many of those donated houses are already up for sale. Gotta wonder where people perceived priorities really are.

@@jasdanvm3845 Do you have any source on that?

​@@jasdanvm3845I wonder if they were pressured by local cartels to force the sale at subpower pricing.

​@@jasdanvm3845 It was in El Salvador, in Mexico its rare that these projects are carried out due to the problem of insecurity

Some post here and there, legallly they cant sell them since they are ok federal land and under a 20 year no sell contract​@@jasdanvm3845

Wait, they didn't even translate it?

@@LordVarkson from what I remember, yes.

​@@LordVarksonThis is like the worst aspect. But assuming everyone speaks English is also really American.

Jfc, that IS bad design. And I say this as a Graphic Designer. Usability is like the most important factor in design

​@@cyan_oxy6734: And failing to properly document is also very much a modern-computing (as opposed to e.g. 80s and earlier computing) defect, in addition to falling dangerously close to some of the ideas they were pushing.

Surprised no one else mentioned this

It was a very different age. Even Usenet was actually still usable for an early part of it, back before AOL provided access to it.

I remember when I first got email. I was excited but then realized I didn't know anyone else who did. Or at least, didn't know any email addresses. In the USA Today newspaper, the car review guy, James Healey, listed his email address. So I emailed him and basically just said I was trying out email, and also asked him what he thought of this car now, that he had reviewed some time back. He replied back to me, very nicely. This was in like 1992. Obviously this is completely impossible now.

la ceibalita! Estaba buscando algun comentario sobre Uruguay

@@tatianavilla5037 in spite of all the problems mentioned here, it was designed for children. They dropped the OLPC now in favor of just a windows laptop and it's a nightmare for parents. Children install video games that parents don't know about and are exposed to sexual predators through the chat. And this is all through a government-provided device that parents cannot opt-out of (and imagine the conflict with the kids if you did). We might as well give them smartphones with TikTok pre-installed at this point.

​​@@alvaromoe what are you taking about? the computers Uruguay use in schools and highschool use linux and most of them have a website blocker And instaling games is reduced to a few games comatible with them. The laptop was replaced with a horrible tablet that didnt allow to install anything in it Whats happening now is that parents give kids smartphones too early

Yo tuve clases de programación con la XO (básicas, solo hacíamos juegos) y varios de mis compañeros se interesaron lo suficiente como para estudiar carreras relacionadas.

probablemente porque Uruguay ya tenía un buen internet en 2006

I think the idea of information tech taking center stage is that in theory they can help people figure out their own solutions to problems. The ol teach a man to fish kind of thing

As some other commentator said that isn't even a universal thing. There was once a foundation that built latrines and toilets for sanitation in this one village and after two years returned to said village to find out the facilities were dismantled. They asked the villagers why and they answered they don't really need the latrines since they can do what they traditionally do fine and use them to fix their leaking roofs...

A church group goes to the Philippines and built a playground. Just like the ones you see at elementary schools in America. Two years later the playground was dismantled and was now being used to patch buildings and homes. If a person is living in a shack, their priorities don’t include “going to the playground.”

But then how will I run Senegalese Coding Sweat Shops? How will I export their misery in the form of databases and spreadsheets? Won't someone please think of the Western Women that won't feel superior to other Western Women?!?!?!

Exactly. Base level infrastructure is so life-changing we take it for granted and don't notice

yeah same, but i did so with dvd players and psp consoles. i would repair then and resell them. it was a good business as a kid and kept me out of trouble.

did the same, without the internet. Having lots of manuals come with the computer definitely helped.

At $3000 you were competing with already established l, known and reliable solutions, mainly the obiquitous mopeds theyuse over there. You comeup with a product, that's not supported, doesn't have the same access to repairs and parts, is seen as extremely cheap l, unreliable and potentially dangerous. It wasn't just because it wasn't a status symbol, people there have old luxury cars, but much more have mopeds and old Toyota trucks.

Usually, cheap products are just that "cheap". I would always buy an old toyota than a shiny new chinese garbage. For an entertainment device like a TV, that's fine; but for a motorbike I hop onto everyday and where safety is paramount, that's a hard pass.

I saw a lot of people driving Tata vehicles in South Africa. Perhaps not the Nano. But they are a very successful manufacturer.

Thats not why it failed dude. Nano was legit a bad product with bad design. Also, it was incredibly small and couldn't fit many people. 😂

I'll never forget my 4th grade introduction to the computer. Teacher introduced the first student to an art/coloring program and they got to play around with it. Then they showed the next student who got to play around with it. My turn came and I don't know if I wasn't shown well or if I just didn't learn quickly, but I was unable to pass the learning along. Humiliation. Not even being in a Western country allowed me to miraculously know my way around a computer, even with one whole (maybe?) lesson from a fellow 4th grader! So, the idea of a rural child in a '3ed world' country knowing what to do....

Computers do not belong in education, unless in support roles in some very narrow applications. The idea that the presence of computers magically makes education work better is pure lunacy. It doesn't matter if a bad essay was written by hand or typed on a computer, its content is still equally bad. PowerPoint is not a replacement for a teaching concept. Don't even get me started on the most abused to the point of rpae piece of software ever conceived, Excel.

@@lucemiserlohn i agree. it also has been proven that spell check just makes kids never bother to properly spell things out. so it some ways it can be more harmful then good. same goes for the over use of calculators.

​@@lucemiserlohn Well said. Thank you.

Children learn how to be productive by themselves. This is how I learned PCs when I was little. Just the machine and manuals. No "grown ups" to really help. And teachers are most often failures. They should be at the forefront of development, but they aren't. It was funny to see online schooling spectacularly fail during the pandemic, when academia, industry and private organisations have figured it out decades ago. For example in Germany they are employed by the state and can't be fired, so naturally they won't lift a finger to learn new things and actually bother to teach the students anything.

We had such similar childhoods that it's wild. But I was lower class and my dad worked on security systems. So, yeah. I completely agree. I remember when that laptop was announced and I was so upset because I wasn't able to buy one. You know who would have loved an open source pc for $100? My poor American self. I was playing Zork on an old laptop my mom had gotten from work that ran Windows 3.1. Zork is great and all, but it was really the only thing that laptop could do. I wanted one so badly, but they didn't sell them. At least, not that I ever saw.

nowadays computers are cheaper but you are not encouraged to program anymore .

Exactly. I had a similar experience. Despite all of that I wasn't interested in coding then, and I still don't care about it now.

Most adults wouldn't be able to/wouldn't feel comfortable repairing a laptop without being guided. So yeah, it's not even that they're too young to be able to do it, it's that they aren't being provided with guidance from someone with more knowledge.

@@technophobian2962 yea I tried to repair electronics and I thought I had the skills to do it because I watched a lot of tutorials. but then I tried it and I ran into many absurd unexpected issues. so now I am just asking experts

To this day, it still happened with Chromebooks

​@@bitelaserkhalifTBF Chrome Books are little more than toys. They take most of the class period to get working

Honestly I grew up in the 2000’s and I’d also have been baffled. Pencil and paper worked just fine, especially because you could write in margins and doodle. Don’t get me wrong I love computers and they help a lot with some schoolwork, but I get why kids just ignored them

@@DeathnoteBB The problem is a lot of schools use way too many online resources and it wastes class time. Why take a test online that takes 30 minutes to set up when you could just pass out a paper test in less than 5 minutes

@@JamesThomas-kx5sjin defense of online work it’s far easier for teachers to manage and a lot of kids like it more because it’s easier to make up from home. When I was in high school and was home sick I could keep up almost completely from home

@@bnb6868 Instead they will send GMO seeds that produce crops that are sterile.

Well, some African countries did expel the white farmers, so you also have that

Then you return in 6 months to find the tractor has been dismantled to make a fence, a house and a plow pulled by 10 village children.

@@NotAnAlchemist_Ed Zimbabwe and Congo sure but everywhere else they stayed or didn't exist in the first place (aka everywhere that wasn't southern continental Africa)

Sam Kinison famously said they, “need to move to where the food is!”

The fiat is NOT a more complex machine. Your fiat does not need to have its engine rebuilt every 5 years and does not have the torque of every bolt on the car documented with strict inspections after every ride with the consequence of doing this wrong being death

​@@BitTheByteuh a car does have more parts, it's technically more complicated. You're just pointing out the reason they cost so much, the regulations for a "certified" aircraft.

ok, there are some HUGE problems with this line of thinking, so i'll try to explain. first there is the OMS regulations, that ussually are VERY estrict (for example, i, as a doctror can go to court if a camera catches me waching my hands for 55 seconds instead of 60), not even mention mass production. so for this incubator they would have to make the buildings where they assemble them totally asceptic, the workers that build them have to use at least gloves, masks, glasses, and biologic issolant clothing just to get in the building to work, the paint have to be special too, so you would have to make A LOT of imports just to get the incubator built. now there is the manteinence and the education for the staff, so at least you need a new carrer on your universities that teaches how to repair them. then there is the social problem, would YOU vote for a goverment that gives those incubators to the hospitals, or would you vote for someone who promises top tech for your hospitals?.

​@@HydraulicDesignThere are reasons for these certifications. It's not arbitrary, and it should be a real consideration. Cars are only more complex in a theoretical sense.

you don't have children. ask me how I know.

Food aid isn't given for free anymore hasn't since the 70s where it wrecked havock on local economies. The only time free food aid is offered is in cases of emergencies.

We don't keep ghost towns open but we do keep other kinds of towns going. In my opinion, to the detriment of everyone. So your point stands. Also don't forget to mention the greed and corruption of a small percentage of the population in these countries.

Or we could recognise that capitalism is unsuitable for everyone except the wealthy, and that so long as the west continues to impose capitalism upon the global south and snuff out anyone who dares to oppose western interests none of these nations will ever reach a point of prosperity. Also telling people to 'just move' is crazy privileged and imperialist. The locations are usually suitable, it's the systems that are flawed.

That's why I like Kiva so much. It's a charity that crowdsources interest free loans to developing world businesses. These people need anywhere between a couple hundred to a $3 or $4 thousand type deal. A mill for peanuts to make peanut butter type of business. Or inventory for a general store. The vast majority of loans get paid back, and 100% of the donations go to the business. They ask for extra on top to cover expenses.

I don't understand how liter of light made any more sense than just making clear corrugated plastic replacement roof panels. You would get more light with less possibly of roof leaks. And soda bottles aren't UV hardened, they disintegrate after a few months in the sun. It sounds like a cargo cult.

To be honest, I don't think anyone I know in the UK (myself included) would ever buy one of those cans thinking that they were 100% exactly what an American would buy in their local shop or whatever (actually, I don't know anyone who would buy those cans full-stop, although I have seen people stare at the hotdogs in the brine jars). Most people who enjoy a hotdog seem to go for the frankfurters... which are vacuum-packed in the chilled aisle lol

​@@horsehorsetigertiger we used to calm them frankfurter in the US, until WW1.

Nah, this is an example of "good design". The manufacturers knew exactly what they were doing 😂

It is good to hear from someone actually in Africa. I wonder why more people are not listening to your point of view, which happens to be different than the story they want to tell.

Through capitalism, most people are able to acquire what they need. If they don't have what they apparently need, then the issue might be somewhere else, not related to procurement. Religion and inferior culture destroy many opportunities.

​@@svr5423: Capitalism only helps when the capital needed is actually available. In many of these places, the capital for major improvements is functionally non-existent, or the knowledge to identify that the available capital can be used for something major is functionally non-existent.

@@absalomdraconis it is available.

I noticed he conveniently left this part out to support his narrative

Considering that tsunamis happen rarely and that villagers likely only had skills related to the sea, I can't imagine why that wouldn't work.

@@SmallSpoonBrigade This is understandable, but in my country rivers flood almost every two years. Ever single time, people are told to build their homes further away, but they always come back. At this point I couldn’t care less, I’d rather be the one selling them the building materials every year than help them out of a situation that they don’t want to get out of.

​@@arcturus4762: Sounds like someone needs to work out a local equivalent to either stilt-houses or floating houses.

A design problem is when that item doesn't get sold or produced because of... it's design 🤣🤣🤣 To be more clear, if you design something without carefully studying the culture that's designed for ending with an item that's not useful for that culture, it's not good design.

Design isn't just optics. More often than not, it's the system of environment it operates in, its technological complexity, and the infrastructure to maintain, repair, replace, and dispose it. You can "design" the greatest thing ever with fantastic looks. But if you only look at the operation state of the life cycle, then you will inevitably fail.

The issue is that the backers are the ones with the money; it's the same problem that plagues the modern game industry where AAA studios pump out games no one wanted.

@@tomanicodin Not being sold can be a lot of things, but in this case most of these items didn't even solve the problem they were trying to solve.

It's moreso about not taking those in consideration when designing something It's true a clever design won't solve those but it's absolutely super important to consider those when you need to design something, be it products, programs, projects in general

I thought the point of the video was mostly the patronising ignorance (at best, racism at worst) evident in the failed "solutions"

And extreme greed and corruption by a select few.

I work in Canada with the guy who came here one year ago from Nigeria and holy crap. The problems are so much worse than I thought. People don't wanna start a business there because they don't like debt. Nobody wants to be in debt. Companies tried to push credit cards, but nobody actually wanted to lend them out because they don't have identification there. If you don't have identification, then somebody can just run up a card and leave. In the west, we are taught that you go into debt for long-term gain, but that's not part of the Nigerian culture at all. It will take generations to solve that problem.

Ha

And with bad intentions. I don’t think that they wanted to help more than they wanted the fame.

curtesy of the IMF and WORLD BANK the road of perpetual poverty is paved with debt

_"paved with good intentions"_ or tax-deductible projects.

@@ignore_for_your_sanity There are a few.

Agreed. But like he said things like the system or government (or culture, individual financial status, infrastructure, etc) are issues too. Too many people, western people, and capitalists put too much emphasis on just individuals and small individual businesses. For example, creating and donating electronics if that place doesn't have infrastructure for electricity. Watch Second Thought and More Perfect Union.

A product can’t be considered a success if it’s perfect in every way *except* nobody wants to use it.

@@user-gu9yq5sj7c Don't watch Second Thought, that guy is lying to you by ommission as someone who used to watch him.

@@Sashazur I don't disagree.

The problem was likely corrupt officials, who want to sell half the machines to the private market. Cant do that with a substandard product.

Hey, I really appreciate the thoughtful message as well as the donation. It really does mean a lot. Thank you!

Then they should have been given directly to children instead of the schools.

Exactly, the real problem is poverty. I'm not sure this is a mysterious cultural factor to value having food to eat. If they had enough money they could afford proper fishing nets and wouldn't need to use the free mosquito nets.

I respectfully disagree. Improper use of a tool is not the fault of the tool creator. The folks misusing the bug nets need to stop using them and allow their habitat to recover. They will be no worse off than before if they do this. Now, since they value fishing over malaria protection, the designers can work on designing cheap, effective and environmentally safe nets to supply next or instead, but they are not responsible for the choices of adults given a tool and told what it was for. The fact that the tool's purpose was easily understood (unlike those cheap laptops and lack of instruction in use) is a key difference, to my mind. The adults made a choice to harm their environment over malaria protection. It may be very understandable, but is not the fault of the designers.

​@@FairbrookWingates how well fed and coddled of you.

@@grantflippin7808 How adult of me. Not blaming someone else for a choice I've made with what they gave me. I'm not shaming the choice itself, to be clear. Just the shifting of blame.

@@FairbrookWingates it's not very mature to deny responsibility for the consequences of actions

I thought everyone did?

regular ? that implies there's a deluxe model or something

Why would you be jealous of something so ordinary?

He did, although in a less obvious way. It's what people mean (among other things) with "cultural issues". And he also stated explicitly the inventors did not take into account to whom they were selling. It's also not about money, you can sell multi million dollar tanks and armoured Maybachs to such countries. The government doesn't care if the incubator is cheap or not, they are simply not interested.

I‘d be chanting praise to the machine god like some Warhammer 40k tech priest

You missed the point... the people actually making the buying decisions didn't want to be sold some 3rd-rate solution no one in the West would be caught dead with.

Like he said, it's not the customers/patients making that choice

Everyone who rides in a car trust their life to car parts whether they realize it or not...

@@hcn6708 it literally is... they all ride in cars...

You're absolutely right, the problem is that nobody thought about it because they started with the assumption that all other needs were met.

In the video, they explained that those nets were devastating for the local environment. It was so tightly woven that absolutely nothing got past it.

And then they sell the provided (expensive) fishing nets, and continue using the free mosquito nets.

@@vast634 why would the fishing nets be worth more? if fishing nets were provided at the same volume as mosquito nets, there wouldn't be any scarcity to inflate their value. also, at least some of the people using the mosquito nets for fishing are clearly aware of the problems, a lot of people won't be waiting for it to become more profitable to switch away from mosquito nets, just doable at all. people don't like using worse things when they can use better things

@@vast634 also who are they selling the nets to in this scenario? unless you're suggesting people will set up global export markets in difficult to reach rural areas with no internet, whoever buys the nets will be local, and guess what they'll use it for? fishing! it still achieves the desired effect.

@@spambot7110 Tha naive. The video just stated that a fining net costs $50, and that they get mosquito nets handed out for free. The mosquito nets also work for fishing, else they would not use them en mass. What the fishers will do is sell the proper fishing nets, even if they can on get $10. So some might use the proper nets, but many will use the free mosquito nets. Also: why should other people pay for their equipment? Handing out things to those poor populations is not always a good thing. As the problem with overfishing shows.

@@vast634 ok choose one, either the fishing nets are $50 or they're free, you can't have it both ways. if you distribute fishing nets for free, they are not $50 anymore, they're free. if fishing nets are being distributed, at quantity, for free, you can't sell a net for $50 anymore, because why would someone pay you $50 for something you can get for free elsewhere? the fact that fishing nets currently cost $50 is not a constant, it's a variable that i'm proposing we *change*. are you concerned about the cost to the program? you realize someone has to pay for mosquito nets too, right? if mosquito nets are economical to give away, and are already able to function as fishing nets, you already have the infrastructure and the economies of scale ready to go. just get your supplier to do a few batches without adding pesticides (fewer steps and consumables), and a coarser pitch (simpler process, lower machine wear). if anything it'll be cheaper per unit. you don't think the quoted $50 price for a fishing net is reflective of their actual production cost, do you? not to mention, supplying fishing nets doesn't even increase the cost overhead of the program by the cost of the nets. if your goal is mosquito protection and nothing else, and you give someone 2 mosquito nets and they use 1 for fishing, you have bought 1 unit of mosquito protection for the price of 2 nets. if you give the same person 1 mosquito net and 1 fishing net, you get the same 1 unit of protection, with the same cost of 2 nets. and presumably you don't actually just care about mosquito protection and nothing else, and now their water isn't getting poisoned and their fish ecosystem isn't getting decimated by bycatch. the cost overhead isn't zero, because there will be some increase in fishing net usage from induced demand, but when your aid program is targeting people living on a subsistence basis, "induced demand" tends to mean "less people starving to death". you'd need an inhumanly narrow sense of scope to see that "overhead" as a failure of your mission. "why should other people pay for their equipment?" what are you talking about? who do you think is paying for the mosquito nets? it's an aid program, one of the core features of an aid program is paying for stuff. unless you're opposed to mosquito net programs as a whole what's the problem? the one valid point you bring up is that giving away stuff for free can have knock on economic effects that build dependence, but that's true for mosquito nets as well. who knows what kind of independent domestic mosquito net industries we've suppressed with these programs? The solution is to work with local governments and organizations, prefer local suppliers, and be constantly listening to the people you're trying to help, rather than imposing your own assumptions about the problem, its scope, and its solution. better yet, we really need to be focusing on taking every opportunity to transfer ownership and control of these programs to the people you're trying to help, whether that's governments, orgs, or directly into communities. that's what this whole video is about, these NGOs coming in, identifying one highly specific problem, implementing a solution with no regard for the bigger picture, and failing catastrophically. your strategy for dealing with the unanticipated side effects of an aid program appears to be: do nothing, and blame the aid recipients for not magically aligning their needs with the program. you're literally just being the olpc guy.

He said it's hard to enforce basically because it's hard to communicate with far away people. It's like using lead back in the day but worse because someone else it's giving it to them

@@xandergonzo4853 "Here are nets that will prevent a disease you've known well for centuries." "Ok, we'll use it to fish and play football with it instead." They seem to prefer getting something concrete right away, rather than preventing something more abstract later. You can't force people to change their preferences just like that.

Uruguayan here. this is why the program was a success in our country. we bought half a million OLPCs during the first years of our involvement and the country later started using other models. we were already a middle income country by 2006 but internet and PCs were expensive. so the government adapted the curricula and the infrastructure to the new educational paradigm and to this day every single school kid to high schooler gets a device, from tablets to a handful of Laptop models depending on the year they are coursing. the biggest problem with the OLPC was that they didnt understand the gulf between a country like mine(Uruguay) and a country in Africa like Ghana that may have a GDP 3 or 4 times lower. so those countries didnt had the money to create the infrastructure needed in the first place to make it a success because of other more pressing needs. as someone here wrote, "OLPC was a program better suited for places in need of more laptops, not places that didnt have any".

Yep. Exactly. It was mostly being advertised as something for places that didn't actually really have use for it yet, but at least it also wound up helping in other places.

Wow, thank you!

I'm not sold on it for that reason, but if it works for others then great.

Why do you assume it will leak? We've had good silicone for ages. It's not an advanced technology.

@@jasondashney because of expansion and contraction, of the bottle and other materials, and this corrugated tin roofs erode a lot. i hope not tho, of course. the author even said they last for 5 years. i wonder what's the failing point at around that time?

OLPC is basically a piece of technology, and just like any other technology, it needs to exist in an infrastructure (Internet, power supply, basically any other node that the device's data can move into outside of the device itself, etc) that can support it. And clearly, the device associated with OLPC is completely on its own out there in Senegal, both in technological and social contexts. There is absolutely nothing that can support it to give it some shred of chance of becoming a kind of sustainable thing the locals will rely on to help them consistently improve themselves in ways, shape, and form that they see fit.

@@TheGrifhinx And if I was having such strong user issues in the US, then they had no chance in West Africa

It was probably the best that could have been done for the price with the technology at the time. Nowadays you could make something a lot better for $200, something that probably would have cost more like $600-800 back then, even considering inflation.

@@Croz89 It kickstarted the netbook revolution, within a few years of the OLPC, you could buy off the shelf netbooks for the same price with better components.

That’s what I’m saying. I don’t know why people like to make it seem like you need some “deep cultural understanding” in order to provide solutions to other countries’ problems.

I feel like the design choices of these products revolved around catching the eye of Western investors and Western public sentiment. I am not an investor, but I assume that investors or philanthropists give money to ideas that appeal to their idea of impoverished areas rather than their actual practicality in their geographical area. Essentially, it seems like mundane, but actually, practical ideas may not go into fruition while exciting ideas would be the ones that actually get funded but don't actually make a difference. This stems from different cultural values between philanthropist/investor and the impoverished.

The medical equipment was trustworthy, though.

Exactly. Westerners would also prefer a normal hand pump, and a professional looking incubator. If that incubator works so well then why wasn't it also used in the US to save money on hospital costs? The real problem is arrogance, believing that poor people will accept absurd or shoddy devices that you would never use yourself.

​@@bob_smite You can't help people that reject building a simple sewer system.