poverty

Q-Drum Rollable Water Bottle

“Water in adequate quantities is too heavy to carry. The burden of fetching water, invariably over long distances by cumbersome and far too often, unhygienic means, is all too evident in rural Africa.... The Q-Drum is a low cost rollable water container for developing countries. The idea of the Q-Drum originated in response to the needs of rural people for clean and potable water, as well as easing the burden of conveying it....

The Q-drum is user friendly and the unique longitudinal shaft permits the drum to be pulled using a rope run through the hole. There are no removable or breakable handles or axles, and the rope can be repaired on the spot or replaced by means available everywhere, such as a leather thong or a rope woven from plant material.”

More: http://www.qdrum.co.za

Watercone

The Watercone is a transparent, polycarbonite cone tuns salt water into potable water cheaply using the power of the sun. The system can produce one liter of clean drinking water a day. Salt water poured into the base evaporates and condenses onto the wall of the cone, trickling into a circular trough at the inner base of the cone. Then just unscrew the cap and turn the cone upside down to pour the potable water into a drinking device.

The cone is non-toxic, non-flammable and 100% recyclable. The black pan for the saltwater is made out of 100% recycled plastic.

More: http://www.watercone.com

Safe Bottle Lamp

“In his hospital alone they were seeing someone die from lamp burns three times a week and thousands of people horribly disfigured, their lives ruined by a preventable accident....

Lamp-burns, [Wijaya Godakumbura, a surgeon in Sri Lanka,] realized, are a disease of poverty. Only the very poor use makeshift lamps. And because they are very poor, no-one is much concerned to do anything to help them. Most of the victims are female and nearly a third are children. Yet, it seemed to him, the problem was preventable....

‘I decided the best design was based on a simple Marmite bottle – small and squat, with two flat sides – equipped with a safe screw-cap to hold the wick. That way, the bottle was more stable. The fuel does not spill if the bottle overturns. It cannot roll. It is strong enough not to break if dropped.’”

More: http://www.safebottlelamp.org

In these pages I’m usually down on depoliticized, product-based fixes for poverty. But then sometimes the impact of a simple change in form is astonishing.

Via the National Design Awards I discovered the work of Sergio A. Palleroni:

“Sergio A. Palleroni, research fellow at the Center for Sustainable Development at the University of Texas, Austin, runs 10-week-long design/build studios around the world in marginalized communities. Participants learn to use hands-on construction and design skills, maximize locally available, recycled, and inexpensive materials, and implement lighting and energy systems that help to reduce energy costs and promote conservation. In turn, communities mobilize indigenous resources and develop long-term practices that sustain cultural identity, dignity, and stability.”

How rare to find a development program that actually seems to engage with the local community and context. Not just ‘humanitarian’ aid, but actual education and collaboration.

Add this to my growing list of architecture and development programs:

• Architecture for Humanity
• Architects Without Borders
• Association for Community Design
• Barefoot Architects
• DesignCorps
• Over the Rhine
• Habitat for Humanity
• Rural Studio
• Sustainable South Bronx
• Voluntary Architects Network

I’m sure there are others I’m leaving out. It’d be instructive to do a closer comparison of the methodologies, politics, and assumptions of various architecture-based anti-poverty programs.

Quite apart from Planner’s Network who work for more fundamental change.

Download as PDF (88 Kb)

See Time To Cancel Tsunami Countries’ Debt, January 10, 2005.

Take Action Now!

via Anarchogeek

I first heard of this in Japan a couple of years ago. A friend who ran a community development initiative in Boston’s Chinatown, was off to Gifu, the butt of all jokes and an industrial city struggling with the long recession and a loss of manufacturing jobs.

It took a while, but I finally had a chance to search around for a decent definition.

Community asset mapping sounds like a good way to begin analyzing and building political power within a community using design and graphics.

From a Michigan State University Best Practices Brief (468 Kb PDF):

“Community Asset Mapping is a capacity-focused way of redeveloping devastated communities. This positive approach is proposed as a substitute for the traditional deficits focus on a community’s needs and problems. Using problems to formulate human service interventions targets resources to service providers rather than residents, fragments efforts to provide solutions, places reliance on outside resources and outside experts, and leads to a maintenance and survival mentality rather than to community development.

Instead, they propose the development of policies and activities based on an understanding, or ‘map,’ of the community’s resources — individual capacities and abilities, and organizational resources with the potential for promoting personal and community development. This ‘mapping’ is designed to promote connections or relationships between individuals, between individuals and organizations, and between organizations and organizations.

The asset-based approach does not remove the need for outside resources, but makes their use more effective.

The community assets approach

• starts with what is present in the community
• concentrates on the agenda-building and problem-solving capacity of the residents
• stresses local determination, investment, creativity, and control

In this context, spatial mapping may or may not be used. Within any given neighborhood or community, most assets as defined by Kretzmann and McKnight, [who developed the asset mapping approach to development,] do not have a spatial quality. Community Asset Mapping has very little to do with spatial mapping... and much more to do with a community survey and the mobilizing of individuals and organizations to make connections and build capacity. The information obtained through the survey process must be organized and accessed in an inventory format. It can be computerized as a data base inventory. Computerized mapping can be used, showing the location of assets on a geographic map, as well as the attributes attached to each asset.

The Community Asset Mapping process as outlined by Kretzmann and McKnight is intended to initiate a process that will fully mobilize a community to use its assets around a vision and a plan to solve its own problems. Their guidebook provides considerable detail about how this might be accomplished, with numerous examples of the types of connections that can be developed.“

Some forms of mapping include:

Mapping Public Capital

Such as

• social gatherings that enable people to learn about what is happening in the community
• organized spaces for interaction where people can learn about, discuss, and act on community challenges
• catalytic organizations that spur discussion on community challenges and marshall a community’s resource to move ahead;
• safe havens for decision makers to meet for unofficial candid discussions.

From this the community, can fill in gaps and identify action points and obstacles to overcome.

Cultural Mapping

Documenting cultural resources in the community — examining long-term customs, behaviors, and activities that have meaning to individuals and to the community. Information for cultural mapping is gathered by face-to-face interviews. Communities can use cultural mapping as a tool for self-awareness to promote understanding of the diversity within a community and to protect and conserve traditions, customs, and resources.

Community Relationship Mapping

Ecomapping was initially developed as an effective way for a therapist to identify relationships within a family. The mapping of inter-organizational linkages is a form of ecomapping designed to show the relationships that one organization has with other organizations within the community. Relationships with other organizations may relate to funding, referrals, access to resources, joint service planning, collaborative projects with contributed staff or funds, etc. Ecomapping may be undertaken to clarify the place of an organization in the community spectrum, to identify gaps in linkages, to indicate the multiple relationships between organizations, etc.

From the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, regarding the Mapping Community Assets Workbook:

“‘From a community development perspective, it helps to think of our communities in terms of their wealth—in people, things, services, and resources that they possess,’ says author Dr. Diane Dorfman. ‘To build from what you have requires asking different kinds of questions to learn different kinds of things about where you live.’

Learning how to ask what communities have to offer begins a process of building and developing. It brings knowledge, skills, and capacities out into the open, where they can work together to everyone’s benefit. As the web of assets grows, so does the potential for the community.

An asset map is an inventory of the strengths and gifts of the people who make up a community. Asset mapping reveals the assets of the entire community and highlights the interconnections among them, which in turn reveals how to access those assets.

The workbook’s engaging, lively style invites active participation on practically every page. Through a series of questions and exercises, readers first learn to uncover their personal assets, both tangible and intangible, material and nonmaterial. Then they expand to take stock of their community, listing all of its special features. Readers also learn how to design a questionnaire to uncover the hidden assets in their community, those from people or places that are not familiar.

‘Connections to people can also become connections to resource-filled institutions. Likewise, a connection to an organization or institution may actually conceal a personal relationship,’ notes Dorfman.

Here’s an annotated resource list on community asset mapping, and a page on asset mapping with youth.

Still there’s something curious about that Michigan State University’s ‘Capable Communities’ center. Why are they offering this particular public service? Is that university campus, like so many in the U.S., surrounded by pockets of poverty? With this image in mind, it occurs to me that Community Asset Mapping is rather “inward” focused. This is the point, I know, but it does not interrogate or confront external actors or institutions, economic or public policies that also give shape to the community. This is, perhaps, a different map. Building a stronger community, however, builds a solid foundation for challenging the status quo.

From Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence:

“In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which now has justified the presence of U.S. military ‘advisors’ in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, ‘Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.’

Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken — the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-oriented’ society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: ‘This is not just.’ It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: ‘This is not just.’ The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: ‘This way of settling differences is not just.’ This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and through their misguided passions urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not call everyone a Communist or an appeaser who advocates the seating of Red China in the United Nations and who recognizes that hate and hysteria are not the final answers to the problem of these turbulent days. We must not engage in a negative anti-communism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.”

— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., April 4, 1967.

Search and replace “napalm” with “depleted uranium”, “Communism” with “terrorism”, “the seating of Red China in the United Nations” with “withdrawing from Iraq.”

The aim of the Ashden Award is:

“to support a project that will provide support to a rural community in a developing country, in a way that alleviates poverty and improves the quality of life, while remaining fully responsive to existing cultural values. The project would need to provide an energy source either for income-generating or agricultural activities or for improving educational or healthcare facilities. The project should have an exemplary value, that could encourage the use of environmentally-friendly, sustainable sources of energy in similar contexts.”

Check out some winning projects.