humanitarian.info

I started thinking innovation in the sector in the middle of last year, after reading The Shock of the Old – patchy book, but one that helps you to think more clearly about life cycles in technology. At the start of this year, the news about InSTEDD’s Humanitarian Technology Review started me thinking about innovation again. Janet quoted the following:

Lovins had heard him speak about a Sudanese refugee camp where aid trucks dispensed water from spigots three times the diameter of the spouts on people’s jugs, which not only wasted water but created puddles that attracted mosquitoes, triggering a malaria outbreak.

I found this story a little… well, strange. If your taps are too wide for people’s jerrycans, then there’s a really simple solution – a small plastic funnel. The story horrifies me not because of the wasted water, but because the solution is so simple, so cheap and so obvious – and nobody thought of it. But apparently this problem made such an impression that

[Lovins] gathered 300 experts on refugee issues, energy generation, water systems, education, design, telemedicine (and one journalist) for a 3-day brainstorming session to tackle the larger of issue of how to improve the daily lives of millions of people “caught in the middle.”

To me this sounds like Lovins got his sledgehammer and went looking for some more walnuts. I might be being unfair on Lovins and others – this is a third-hand story, after all – but one thing has become clear to me over the last few years. As exciting as many of these new technology developments are, they still don’t seem to have had much impact on the sector.

I haven’t been in the field that much in the last couple of years, but in both Bangladesh and Georgia ICT innovations was conspicuous in its absence. The technologies that have spread are the ones that have been adopted without any prompting – mobile telephony, neo-geo, and so forth (I’m actually struggling to come up with many). There is a generation of technology innovation which is seeking to piggy-back on those (particularly the ubiquitous mobile phone) but it’s too early to tell if they will be successful (remember, successful here is defined as enduring and widespread).

This goes to the heart of my thinking about innovation – because innovation is about the application of ideas. The other thing to remember is that innovation is not inherently positive – it may in fact be a dead end, a red herring or a wild goose chase.¹ Innovation can have a net negative effect if it takes resources (including attention) away from proven technologies – like plastic funnels, for example.

1. I know that I mix my metaphors, but they’re so darn tasty. [↩]