Appropriate Technology

Appropriate Technology is a concept that refers to improvements and developments to communities that are sustainable over time in components, maintenance, investment and operation.

Appropriate Technology developed from some significant failures in large-scale, high-cost development strategies that became inoperable because they could not be sustained after their initial set-up due to lack of infrastructure, parts or technical expertise.

Often it was because solutions that had worked in one part of the world were transposed to another – with very different conditions – but with no allowance for the changes in circumstance.

Appropriate Technology strategies grew from the drive for Intermediate Technology solutions in contrast to High Technology solutions being inappropriately inserted into communities and economies that were unable to sustain them long-term.

The ‘Intermediate Technology Development Group’ (ITDG) was established by Dr Eric Schumacher in 1966. Focusing on developments amongst some of the poorest communities in need, Schumacher recognised that large, costly, sophisticated technology solutions that may work in the richer parts of the world often failed to deliver when the infrastructure wasn’t there to support them or where the environment was significantly different.

In 1988 the ITDG state that:

“Essentially, this alternative course for development is based on a local, small-scale rather than national, large-scale approach. It is based on millions of low-cost workplaces where people live – in the rural areas – using technologies which can be made and controlled by the people who use them and which enable those people to be more productive and earn money.”

Some of the key features of Appropriate Technology schemes are:

• Recognising, appreciating and making use of local skills, knowledge and aspirations rather than the ‘outside expert’. This may include training people from the local community to bring their skills up to the required level (see ‘Solar Engineers’ below).
• Making use of local resources, as far as possible – material and skills.
• Being sensitive to community benefits from the scheme and ensuring they are distributed as widely as possible and have minimal negative consequences.
• Being sustainable – both to the environment and in having long-term operation without the need for constant inputs of investment or maintenance.

Example of Appropriate Technology: Barefoot College Solar Engineers

There are hundreds of isolated rural villages in over a dozen countries in Africa and Asia where electric lights illuminate courtyards and streets at night. Communities are safer, people attend evening classes – learning to read, write, study accountancy and computing, - children can complete homework, and there is less denudation of woodland for firewood.

An initiative of ‘The Barefoot College’, set up by Sanjit ‘Bunker’ Roy after he graduated in India in the 1960s, women from many parts of the developing world have come together to train to be solar engineers at the college in India. Skilling middle-aged women rather than men, Sanjit argues that women are more likely to stay in their village and use the benefits of the training for their own community, whereas men are more likely to migrate to a city to increase their earnings elsewhere. Two women – usually grandmothers – are recruited from each participating village, who have social respect within their community, so they will be listened to and can teach other village women.

The training course lasts six months and 180 women are trained each year in constructing solar power systems from the necessary components. Once they return to their villages, they install the solar power systems the village has saved up and paid for. Since 2008 nearly half a million people in over a thousand remote rural villages have benefitted from solar light at night brought to them by the grandmother solar engineers.