AT

In 1973, the well-known British economist Ernst "Fritz" Schumacher published what was to become his most influential work: Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. The collection of essays, considered one of the most important books published since the end of World War II, was an immediate hit; it described to a broad audience his concept  of "appropriate technology" (AT),  a movement which he had originally developed more than a decade earlier, as "intermediate technology", when advising first the Burmese then the Indian governments. The idea was to develop and apply, usually though not solely within the context of developing economies, technology that reflects poorer countries' relatively labor-intensive factor inputs. Two decades of experience starting just after World War II, during which it was thought that assisting developing countries was best done by implanting Western, capital-intensive technology, to thereby induce an economic "take-off" through industrialization, had been shown to do little for the long-run development of particularly the poorest economies, and indeed virtually nothing for their pervasive poverty.  Schumacher and others proposed, instead, designing and applying technology that, in general, would entail low capital investment per unit of output; it would be small-scale, locally installed, operated and monitored, easily adaptable to specific circumstances, environmentally friendly and energy-efficient, and above all would exploit the labor surplus typical of developing economies. Examples include hand-powered  and treadle water pumps, water treatment systems that are designed to incorporate community- and/or household-scale point-of-use designs, building design that includes vents, strategically placed for natural ventilation, thermal chimneys and cooling towers, composting toilets and village containment pools, hand-wheel generators, and many more.

The AT movement, which, at its very beginning, floundered, grew dramatically through the 1970's and 1980's, becoming mainstream, supported by all the established aid and development institutions, including the World Bank and the World Health Organization. In 1983, the OECD published the results of an extensive survey of appropriate technology organizations titled, The World of Appropriate Technology,  listing over 1,000 such government and private groups; economic departments of major world universities rushed to establish institutes of overseas development that focused, among other things, on the application of appropriate technology (in one of which, at Strathclyde University in Scotland, this writer participated as a graduate student). In recent years, the concept has taken on a more private-sector, individual involvement, evolving to include what is termed open-source appropriate technology (OSAT), where designs, funding and implementation experience are shared and solicited for freely and broadly on the internet. In certain cases, such as on the OECD website, the term "appropriate technology" is now known as "environmentally sound technologies"; similarly, the United Nations now uses the term "sustainable development" in the place of AT.

One such example of an OSAT organization is Water.org, a non-profit co-founded by the actor Matt Damon and a partner, Gary White. Their mandate, "safe water and the dignity of a toilet, for all, within our lifetime", was developed in the face of dramatic statistics regarding access to and use of clean water in poor countries: 780 million people, about 1 in 9 in the world, lack access to clean water, and more than double that, some 2.5 billion, lack access to a toilet. Noted on their website, Mr. Damon and Mr. White list the consequences:

• More than 3.4 million people die each year from water, sanitation, and hygiene-related causes. Nearly all deaths, 99 percent, occur in the developing world.
• 2.5 billion people lack access to improved sanitation; 1.1 billion still practice open defecation.
• Lack of access to clean water and sanitation kills children at a rate equivalent of a jumbo jet crashing every four hours.
• 443 million school days are lost each year due to water-related illness.
• Women and children bear the primary responsibility for water collection in the majority of households. This is time not spent working at an income-generating job, caring for family members, or attending school.

These statistics are well known within the international development community. But the Damon/White team, with their underlying approach of not just drilling wells, but also delivering sustainable water and sanitation infrastructure that is inexpensive, and locally developed and maintained, aims to exploit the internet for funding of such initiatives - on a micro level. Thus, their new WaterCredit program connects financial institutions to communities with the need for, and the will to implement, water and sanitation projects. Its impact to date is remarkable - it is operating in 5 countries, with 33 active partners, has made some 200,000 loans of an average size of $179, and has already improved clean water access for nearly 1 million people.

Fritz Schumacher, who died suddenly in 1977 at age 66, would have been thrilled - perhaps astonished - to learn how a late-20th-century emerging technology - the internet - has been combined with his concept of appropriate technology to alleviate extreme poverty.