I like the idea behind this. I feel like far too often, the solutions we build for poor communities involve specific materials that can't be manufactured locally, so it just creates more dependence rather than self-sufficiency.
It's one thing to build and ship 1000 bicycles to a poor village, but it's another to teach a village how to make bicycles with random spare pipes and materials they can find anywhere. That way if something breaks, they have the skillset to fix it.
If you go to villages in developing nations, you'll see these kinds of innovative solutions all over - things that don't seem like they should work but they just do after lots of trial and error.
I strongly agree that it's incomparably more important to teach a man/village how to fish/build a bike than to give them one. Unfortunately most people who focus on "helping" are grossly incompetent and have largely misaligned incentives (and oversight).
As for local innovation, it think it very much depends on where. I've visited and lived in many communities in developing nations in Latin America and there's a distinct dearth of not just innovative solutions, but even just basic and seemingly obvious ones. Upon seeing and feeling this 7 years ago, I decided to dedicate my life to it. I'm hopeful that in the coming year I'll finally be ready to share what I've been working on to facilitate it in a more scalable way...
When I went to South Africa last, we went through a few slums.
It was comical to see the celebrity "assistance" in the form of e.g., a music production studio + school set up by skrillex, neighboring areas where people lived in shipping crates with stolen electricity jumpered directly from main, and with water tapped off city lines and bucketted in.
They dont need djs, they need plubmbers, carpenters, and electricians first! Fires and water loss were endemic. Almost everyone lived off government assistance, stole / smuggled resources, and blocked traffic/protested when the illegal resource taps were shut down or a government job didn't manifest. The people who made money where they lived usually washed cars or sold trinkets to tourists or brewed bucket beer.
That is why Heifer International is such an important charity:
https://www.heifer.org/our-work/approach
I think, largely, both options should be used in tandem. Give the hungry some fish, they need it, but while you're there teach them how to fish
> I strongly agree that it's incomparably more important to teach a man/village how to fish/build a bike than to give them one. Unfortunately most people who focus on "helping" are grossly incompetent and have largely misaligned incentives (and oversight).
It goes deeper than that if you ask me. It's rarely about "helping" in a lot of cases in the first place, and there's no incompetence at play either.
Just look at food aid to Africa. You know, the campaigns with banners of emaciated African children holding empty food bowls. These aren't primarily about helping African children, but about diverting European (or American) oversupply towards Africa to stabilize prices in the domestic markets - and they all but wiped out African food industry. Simbabwe was known as the "corn chamber of Africa" but lost that in a matter of decades as the cheap food from Europe was cheaper than they could produce. Or clothing donations, these ended up as "mitumba" in Africa, and wrecked local supply chains so hard that, by the time the Chinese came around, there was nothing left to fight.
The White Man's Burden by William Easterly covered this in some detail quite a few years ago.
I had never really considered the _competence_ of help before. It makes a huge amount of sense and is a strong argument for intelligent younger folk looking for a meaningful career. Instead of engineering for the pocket lining of your chosen billionaire, why not use those incredible skills to use in frugal or humanitarian engineering
> why not use those incredible skills to use in frugal or humanitarian engineering
Because no one is willing to pay them for it and they have bills to pay.
This is the reason we won’t tax the bots for UBI, they have bills to pay too.
Check out David Malawey's work: https://www.youtube.com/@davidmalawey
He's teaching proper engineering with commodity parts and accessible technologies.
In my fairly extensive experience, non-profit organizations are not just full of and run by grossly incompetent people, but deeply arrogant and/or deluded ones as well. I have NEVER found an organization that has a genuine desire to seek truth, efficacy etc. They often go with whatever their first (inevitably insufficient) idea was, and not only reject all criticism but respond with indignity, etc...
There's no meaningful/competent oversight. It's all just about feels and optics. And thus no real progress has or will be made.
Anyway, yes, I agree that competent and genuine people (who are extremely rare) ought to try to make a meaningful impact in the world. But there's generally more money in something else.
(one rare exception that comes to mind, though i haven't visited them, is The Ocean Cleanup project. They seem to be experimenting and succeeding towards the worthwhile goal of making effective engineering interventions for cleaning up waterways and oceans)
To some extent, one doesn't even see the competent non-profits. They don't market aggressively, they don't scale up rapidly, they just stick to their niche and quietly hammer away at it for decades on end (often on things that have no feasible exit, like schools that will need to be externally funded forever)
That seems like a simple money regulations issue. If the school has a $100 million endowment, but doesn't spend into it, the school would exist forever. If we say 10% returns a year, that's $10 million to spend on students in the form of teachers and classrooms and housing and books and everything. Unfortunately, that only teaches N students per year. But it would last ~forever. If, however, you get greedy with wanting to teach more than N students per year, then you get into the treadmill of needing external funding forever, but on the face of it, I don't accept that external funding is required forever.
A 100 million endowment is effectively "forever funding" from the perspective of a school that takes in maybe 200k/year of donations. You don't get 100 million endowments without the scale and marketing, unfortunately
The vast majority of the chicken flocks in South Korea are descended from chicks donated by Heifer International during and shortly after the Korean War.
https://www.heifer.org/blog/historic-gift-from-south-korea-a...
The Carter Center has nearly eliminated the Guinea Worm: https://www.cartercenter.org/programs/guinea-worm/
I'm sure there's plenty of incompetent nonprofits out there, but there's plenty of incompetent for-profits as well.
The difference is that the non-profits come with the expectation that they're genuine, well-run, accountable etc. For profits don't really have any moral expectation
There are plenty of nonprofits making a difference, your cynicism aside.
How is that difference measured, in general?
Setting aside cynicism is one thing but what answers are there for skepticism besides the very common moralizing personal attacks?
When I see a lot of nonprofit leadership improving their own lot much more reliably than the people “they serve”, I wonder if the handouts are just being politically diverted to the best and most politically valuable promoters.
If UBI is off the table, competition for gatekeeping resources becomes a dark market.
https://www.cartercenter.org/programs/guinea-worm/#by-the-nu...
> Since our efforts began in 1986, the incidence of Guinea worm has fallen by more than 99.99% to 10* human cases in 2025
So your honest position that you're arguing here is that literally every nonprofit is not making a difference? Every one of them? What are we even talking about here?
Because i would rather solve the problems close to home, the problems involving those billionaires.
Im not going to put effort into turning those other people in another country into a new cash crop for billionaires.
Who's taking care of me when I'm old and my body and mind are failing? Billionaires aren't gonna, but the money they pay me can be used to trade for goods and services, so hopefully when it's my time, it's less shitty.
We spend 60 years of our lives being miserable so that the last 10 will be slightly less miserable. How does that make sense?
> If you go to villages in developing nations, you'll see these kinds of innovative solutions all over - ...
Years ago I remember reading an article about Russians making a living in the USSR. A man in a town wanted to mow his lawn but could not afford a mower (or maybe he could not easily obtain one?) His solution was a scavenged washing machine motor mounted to an old kids tricycle spinning a home made blade.
World Bicycle Relief has one approach to the transportation angle:
https://worldbicyclerelief.org/mechanics-of-mobility/
One product which I can still remember back from when Banana Republic was still an obscure and cool and independent company with a charming hand-illustrated catalog was pairs of slippers/shoes made in 3rd world countries where the sole was a repurposed worn-out bicycle tire.... Interesting inversion of the usual order of things.
it's very easy to verge into OLPC type thinking with this, you probably should just give them normal bikes instead of trying to come up with some bespoke DIY-able system
the OLPC was the "send them bikes" disguised as the DIY-able system. They designed what they thought would be the best computer for impoverished children when in reality those children had no real use for a computer
I dunno, saying they don't have a use for a computer seems incorrect to me, even in the poorest parts of the world today, a substantial minority have acquired their own computer that's cheap, small, efficient, has a built in long distance radio, can run arbitrary software, doesn't require reliable electricity (I mean cell phones)
obviously it's a different technological and economic today compared to 2005, but still, "the global poor don't need computers" is questionable just based on the fact that they are spending their own money to get them
Saying they had no use for a computer was a poor choice of words. Rather, OLPC wasn't what those communities needed
> bespoke
I see what you did there
It's extremely expensive to ship bikes around - even old unused ones.
> It's one thing to build and ship 1000 bicycles to a poor village, but it's another to teach a village how to make bicycles
Buying and shipping X amount of Y to <country> is easy to calculate the cost. And it's a fixed one time cost. Perfect for PR OP, and humanitarian operation with limited budget and/or available work hours.
Teaching takes the most valuable resources of all: Time. And it's harder to predict how long (and therefor how much $$) it will take before having sustainable results. And it requires on-premise staff and usually to setup some building for the staff, for the teaching grounds, etc.
Tl;DR teaching can easily be 10X the time and money budget of a quick 'send stuff' operation. This is why these are usually big operation handled by big non-profit.
There are game-theoretically aligned ways.
See for example https://oneacrefund.org/ [0] where they have a revolving loan fund.
OAF lends materials and teachers to farmers to make the more productive, by the end of the program they got productive enough to pay back the loan and OAF can lend the same money to someone else.
It's super capillary, with many boots on grounds and quality problems.
Embedded into this there's a good feedback channel: farmers who don't think are getting a good service stop paying back the loan. This allows OAF to go and audit what's failing there.
[0] The person who started also appeared in a podcast where they explained the basics https://foreveron.com/podcast/episode-035/
I think this extends to wealthy communities too. Basically every item in my home more complex than a spoon is beyond my capacity to manufacture or repair. A resource that teaches me how to build useful things without relying on a complex supply chain or prohibitively expensive tools would be pretty darn liberating.
Well, fundamentally, there are two different types of furniture:
- platforms
- boxes
so if one can build a drawer box, one should be able to make pretty much anything --- it's just a matter of working out how to cut things to length/width and possibly reduce/adjust thickness and what sort of joinery one wishes to use.
See my top-level post elsethread for the metal-working angle.
You know you already have that resource, right? That's what the internet is. There's nothing stopping you from learning, for example, woodworking today. You just have to start.
> It's one thing to build and ship 1000 bicycles to a poor village, but it's another to teach a village how to make bicycles with random spare pipes and materials they can find anywhere. That way if something breaks, they have the skillset to fix it.
Counterpoint: the bits of a bicycle that are likely to wear out or break are not the pipes that you can find just about anywhere, but difficult-to-make things like chains and bearings.
You know what they say: ship a village 1000 bicycles and they ride for a day. Teach a village to make bicycles and they ride for the rest of their lives.
The counterargument is, of course, "but what's in it for me?"
Ship a village 1000 bikes and one person is going to end up seizing control and selling them to everyone at market value. Perhaps even under the guise of being a social non-profit whose profits go to help people (extremely ineffectively)
Source: I've literally seen this with my own eyes
> The counterargument is, of course, "but what's in it for me?"
People who ask this have never gone above and beyond to help someone, expecting nothing in return save for the gratitude they receive. It's a damn shame.
Making your own bicycle is a waste of time and energy. If you’re buying in bulk from China, you can get a bike for around a $20 per unit cost. I know that $20 is a lot of money in some parts of the world, but it would make far more sense to organize bulk purchases than to try to start up some kind of ersatz low quality bike industry.
Strong disagree. It's much better to get the village a cost-efficient, mass-produced good and then get it on the production program (setup factories/businesses/etc..).
These tools might be useful in war, weird remote situations or maybe when no capital/investors are willing to inject capital in some remote poor african village. But I can't see why any government that can borrow money should do that.
This is of course all wonderful and the ideas presented here might also be useful for Western nations if the war machine starts gaining momentum in, say, a decade or two and things will turn uncomfortable.
That said, I'm also disgusted by the fact this is necessary at all. We designed and/or let an inherently unfair game go on unimpeded and give the losers some scraps so they may survive and continue to play along with can only be called the naturally occurring and less entertaining variant of The Hunger Games.
Any changes to the status quo will have to contend with powerful questions because why build bonds with people you distrust? Why bother including insignificant nations in your decision process? Why not be top dog and trample everyone under your righteous boots? Why not exploit and generally harvest the shit out of everything in sight and retrieve resources for the absolute minimum you can get away with? These sound annoying and they are, but they are really tough questions and they demand a good answer. Just "be a good person" is not cutting it. We need systemic solutions.
In case you're wondering I have the answer: sadly I do not, but I am convinced a couple of you do so please enlighten me.
Imo it depends on priorities!
What do we care more about? The present? The current generation? Or future generations? Our children, grandchildren, great grandchildren? The perpetuation of human civilization? The perpetuation of human civilization with a set of values that that supports the growth and happiness of all?
That's the first question, right? Alignment. Sustainable alignment.
From there, it's all about sustaining those shared values, and minimizing risk. Build bonds: keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Or establish trust. It works out better in the long run; people don't usually Like to stab each other in the back Trampling starts cycles of revenge, and that's no fun for anyone involved either Exploitation prioritizes short term gain and screws you in the long run, more often than not.
What would be nice is setting up as much manufacturing as possible in Africa for making bikes designed for Africa.
Bike maintenance isn't a skill issue. It's an issue of specialised tools and hard to get spares. Talk to your own Grand parents. If they weren't rich they'd have had to fix their own bike, and they wouldn't have had Google helping them.
What would be different about a bike designed for Africa than one designed for anywhere else? What parts that require specialized tools should be redesigned to use standard tools?
https://www.buffalobicycle.com/storage/documents/Buffalo_com...
The buffalo bike is one that was specifically made for developing nations and the project prioritizes local assembly and repair, while the bike is designed to sacrifice weight and aerodynamics, instead offering heavier-duty parts like thicker rims, puncture-proof tires, high-capacity racks, etc. This bike has two chains to reduce the likelihood of a critical failure and an internal coaster brake hub which is more robust to the elements.
Your average low-cost bike isn't intended to be used in environments with rough terrain and high contaminant concentrations without regular maintenance, and especially older bikes with things like cup and cone bearings which are more susceptible to dirt getting in, thinner tires which puncture more easily, and nonstandard bits and pieces like derailleur hangers which predate the UDH standard.
Buffalo bicycles cost around $150 at least. That's frankly way too expensive to be a good bike for developing countries no matter how well suited it is for rough terrain.
The best bikes I saw were ones that a kid from a family could buy for maybe $20 in local currency and the repairability comes from the cheap cost - if something breaks down, you can find the replacement part from a spare bike that broke down months ago.
Well I'm not African so I don't know.
I'm thinking that in the west we either have very cheap bikes that aren't really designed for long term use, and more expensive bikes tend to use fancier parts.
Off the top of my head. Steel frame, can be repaired / modified with any old welder. Designed so it can be taken apart with the minimum of generic tools. Standard bearings, brake blocks etc (probably brake blocks that you can shove some piece of old tyre in).
Front forks and the crank require special tools to remove. I assume the free wheel assembly would be the same. I don't know if it would be possible to modify these to be serviceable with basic tools, the point is an African could probably work out how to fix a bike, the issue would be affording tools and spares, and availability of those tools and spares.
Yeah, that sounds about right. I assume such bikes, parts and tools do exist. Can probably order it all on alibaba. I intend to investigate and do this in the coming years, but have to attend to other things first.
Sounds like a Dutch bike would work well
> Off the top of my head. Steel frame, can be repaired / modified with any old welder. Designed so it can be taken apart with the minimum of generic tools. Standard bearings, brake blocks etc (probably brake blocks that you can shove some piece of old tyre in).
So basically just your average cheap crappy Halfords Bike-Shaped Object type "bike"?
No. I politely covered BSOs
"very cheap bikes that aren't really designed for long term use"
You want cheap and reliable, not cheap with a load of doodads to make it seem expensive.
Well you strip all the crap off, don't you? Just run the barest frame possible.
You still have the problem that the bits that you cannot just knock up out of old Morris Minor steering columns or AK47 barrels are the bits that break.
I know one person who has legitimately worn out a bike frame, in 40-something years of cycling, and it wasn't me. It was a guy who rode his bike about 50 miles *every single day* and rode from Edinburgh to Glasgow and back a couple of times a week. Eventually it started cracking around the welds.
The problem is BSOs tend to have weird/non-standard parts which complicate repair/replacement and the tools necessary for working on them.