In the current issue of Innovations President Bill Clinton and other authors present the strategies and on-the-ground innovations that are leading the way in Haiti’s earthquake recovery efforts.  This special edition was distributed to the participants of the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative, held in New York on September 21-23.

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The Winter 2010 edition of Innovations,  Invention-Led Development,  introduces four new case studies authored by outstanding Ashoka-Lemelson Fellows who are transforming lives through technology. It also features proposals for action from President Paul Kagame of Rwanda, Paul Polak of IDE,  Matthew Bishop of The Economist, and Julia Novy-Hildesley of the Lemelson Foundation, among other leading academic, policy, and practice leaders.

Read how technology can be better designed and more effectively distributed at scales that can tackle, not just tickle, today’s global challenges.

Dona Catalina's New Pump

Doña Catalina lives in a place called Gualjaina, situated on Argentina’s Patagonian plains, in a precariously built house many kilometers from any of her neighbors. She lives by raising sheep and a cow or two, and from the produce of her small farm, where, at great sacrifice, she raised her five children. Doña Catalina had been drawing water from her well with a bucket and rope for over 60 years. That’s why she looks so happy now that she has her rope pump manufactured by Emprendimientos de Tecnologías para la Vida (ETV), founded in Argentina by Ashoka-Lemelson Fellow Gustavo Gennuso. ETV’s rope pump allows Doña Catalina to water the farm crops and have water inside her home. She complained because the water tank has been exposed to the sun so much that the water comes out warm, as she is used to “really cold” water, so we showed her how she can have a direct water outlet without the water going through the tank. She tells us that her relatives have come from far away to see what this rope pump is all about.

Download Pumping Life into Marginalized Communities: ETV’s Technology Model by Gustavo Gennuso and the other Ashoka-Lemelson Fellow cases studies in our special edition.

India. Region of Assam, Guwahati. July 2009.

Rickshaw Bank promotes human dignity and alleviates poverty through asset ownership. To do this, Rickshaw Bank has deployed user-centered rickshaw design, micro-credit, and novel business models to help transform rickshaw drivers into rickshaw owners on a growing scale throughout India.

Download Rickshaw Bank: Empowering the Poor through Asset Ownership and the other case studies and articles from “Invention-Led Development” for free.

Always right

So far, the effort to bring life-changing technologies to the poor has amounted to tinkering around the edges instead of operating at a scale commensurate with the global need. Drawing from his experience at International Development Enterprises, Paul Polak, together with co-authors Peggy Reid and Amy Schefer, argues for a new, ambitious approach to designing and deploying technologies that are affordable, based on poor people’s real lives, provide immediate returns, and are brought to scale by hard-nosed entrepreneurs who build scalable business models.

Download 2.4 Billion Customers: How Business Can Scale Solutions to Poverty and the other articles from the Ashoka-Lemelson “Invention-Led special edition”.

Design that matters

Through the lens of his experience as founder of Design that Matters, Timothy Prestero argues that designing for the poor is not business as usual, but a problem-solving methodology that uses an empathic approach to identify and contextualize needs that guide the development of new products and services.

Download Better by Design: How Empathy Can Lead to More Successful Technologies and Services for the Poor and the other articles from “Innovation-Led Development”.