Dorma (卓玛) rose in the business world by migrating from trade to trade and from city to city; wherever opportunity presented itself. She is one of the few women of her ethnicity to run her own non-restaurant business.

One Earth Designs recently visited Dorma’s factory with local university students to negotiate solar technology prices. Seventy watt solar panels cost 2,000 RMB (293 USD) and 8 watt solar panels cost 400 RMB (58 USD).

As for solar cookers, China has a handful of standard designs that you can read about here. Dorma sells the two most popular designs:

(1) Concrete Butterfly Solar Cooker:

Butterfly solar cookers are asymmetric parabolas. In this solar cooker, the asymmetric parabolic dish is made from concrete. Small mirrors (usually 1”x 1”) are then pasted on the surface of the concrete parabola using tar or silicon adhesive. The base of the cooker is a circular concrete slab.

• Cost: 150-200 RMB (22-29 USD) + tax + shipping
• Weight: 95kg (209 lbs)
• Long Distance Transportation: 20% breakage in route to the villages
• Collection Area: 1.88 m²
• Reflector: Both tar and silicon glue lose efficacy when exposed to weathering. If mirrors are not placed tightly together, these glues melt and the mirrors fall off within a few weeks to a few months.
• Assembly Time: 20 minutes
• Boil Time/5L water (summer): 10 minutes, sunny day (30 C ambient; 86 F)
• Boil Time/5L water (winter): 2.5 hours, sunny day (-15 C ambient; 5 F)
• Accidents:
  • Starts unwanted fires
  • Burns through pots
• Cooking: Fast but cooks food unevenly

(2) Cast Iron Butterfly Solar Cooker

This is also an asymmetric parabolic solar cooker. The dish is made from two cast iron wings that unscrew for separate transportation. Mylar is pasted on the surface to boost specular reflectivity. Standard paper glue is used as the adhesive. The base is designed like a wheelbarrow in order to increase portability.

• Cost: 420-500 RMB (62-74 USD) + tax + shipping
• Collection Area: 1.62 m² (0.81 per wing)
• Weight: 70 kg
• Long Distance Transportation: Mylar often tears during transport to villages.
• Reflector: Pasting Mylar leaves many bubbles and insufficiently pasted edges which tear easily during transportation and weathering.
• Assembly Time: 5-10 minutes
• Boil Times: Slightly less than concrete cooker
• Cooking: Fast but cooks food unevenly

Although Dorma sells these cookers, she does not manufacture them. We went to visit solar cooker factories in Gansu, Sichuan, and Qinghai in order to compare prices and profit margins. Here, we report these values for the concrete solar cooker (only the government manufactures metal cookers as the unsubsidized cost of purchasing them is prohibitively expensive for most households).

The total price of manufacturing a concrete solar cooker averaged 84 RMB (12 USD). Profit margins for the factory owner ranged from 36 to 116 RMB (5-17 USD).

Many factory workers had recently relocated to urban centers from the countryside. Workers laying mirrors were able to make 6 cookers per day, thus earning 36 RMB (5 USD). If they work 7 days per week every day of the year they can make slightly more than 2/3rds China’s average urban income. The workers we spoke with had bandages covering cuts on their fingers from the edges of the glass mirrors.

Workers laying concrete were able to make 13-15 cookers per day, thus earning 39-45 RMB (6-7 USD). If they work every day of the year, they earn a few hundred RMB short of China’s average urban income.

One Earth Designs is inspired by Dorma’s success and saddened by the low wages and poor working conditions faced by rural peoples relocating to urban areas (those few able to find city jobs). We are working with local development organizations, universities, and communities to nurture a new generation of nomadic entrepreneurs skilled at merging traditional design practices and materials with modern needs and urban capacities.

Stay tuned for an introduction to our novel solar cooker design, the SolSource 3-in-1, and its potential as a local income generator.

One Earth Designs (OED) was founded in 2007 by Catlin Powers and Scot Frank ( OED website; OED blog; OED facebook page; Twitter@OneEarthDesigns). Catlin will post on Mondays and Wednesdays. You can also find her on Twitter @CatlinPowers.

My favorite example is a set of greenhouses that one foreign aid organization built here in Qinghai. The organization didn’t tell the villagers how to use them so, instead of growing crops, the villagers stored their motorcycles inside so that the motors would start more easily in the winter.

Without an understanding of the social, economic, political, cultural, and environmental contexts of a region; without both listening to constituents and teaching about new ideas; without follow-through and continuity; and without scalability, development projects (no matter their technical excellence) are doomed to failure.

Informed Impact & Local Students’ Efforts: Unlike foreign-based organizations, local groups have a much deeper understanding of and greater ability to meet these conditions.

In western China, they have done so. Thousands of rural communities have accessed tap water, adopted cleaner cooking technologies, revised farming practices, and built schools with libraries through student and community led grass-roots efforts. A few examples are Shamo Thar’s Development Program at Qinghai Normal University, Pentok, The Bridge Fund (TBF), the Jinpa Trust, the Friendship Charity Association, the Normgo Education Association, and the Snowland Service Group.

Communities and grass-roots development groups have built a wealth of sustainable social and physical infrastructure by implementing their own solutions and reaching out to others (whether neighboring communities or aid organizations) for any additional resources they need along the way.

In fact, it is only when local groups need project funding, technical capacity building, or confidence to act based on local knowledge (even when others might put them down for doing so) that foreign-led groups are any use at all. One Earth Designs aims to build confidence and technical capacity in the arenas of science and engineering, but our impact is by no means comparable to that achieved by the teachers, students, and communities who really run the show.

Foreign Students’ Efforts: The offending paper was written by a student ‘changemaker’ visiting Qinghai for just one month. While the author cannot be blamed for misunderstanding the dynamics of local development efforts, s/he should be held accountable for acting upon misconceptions. The same holds true for all student changemakers.

Social entrepreneurship and sustainable development are popular terms among US students. But, although the US university community offers many resources to help students become changemakers (in their own communities or abroad), few turn talk into action. Many of those who do take action fail to understand the communities they work with or to ensure project continuity beyond the 1-3 months of their involvement.

Even worse, I have often heard students lying to the communities with which they are working. I once heard an Engineers Without Borders (EWB) regional staff member counsel local chapters to ‘tell communities that [they] will return regardless of whether or not [they] actually will’ because it ‘fosters a sense of trust’.

Students who really want to make change can start out with three steps. First, they can learn from the mistakes and successes of other students doing development projects. Skill-building conferences such as the Global Engagement Summit (GES) at Northwestern University, the International Development Design Summit (IDDS) hosted by MIT, and Clinton Global Initiative University’s (CGIU’s) annual student conference are just a few of the great opportunities in this vein. Second, students should spend time travelling and living in the region where they hope to make positive impact. Third, students should learn how they can best help directly from their partner communities.

Sensitivity & Academic Integrity Abroad: Lastly, please make every effort not to jeopardize the lives or work of your community partners.

As changemakers, your actions have the potential to create great positive impact in the world. The positive nature of this impact, however, hinges on your intentions. If your intentions are sincere, they will lead you to respect and connect deeply with those around you. By doing so, you will naturally find a way to do good things in the world.

One Earth Designs (OED) was founded in 2007 by Catlin Powers and Scot Frank ( OED website; OED blog; OED facebook page; Twitter@OneEarthDesigns). Catlin will post on Mondays and Wednesdays. You can also find her on Twitter @CatlinPowers.

Basillica Cistern, Istanbul, Turkey. Photo: Tyler Durden.

The Greater Tragedy: Not only are we losing the knowledge and inventions that first allowed humans to adapt to life in the world’s great deserts and on its snow-capped mountains, but the communities responsible for these innovations now feel ashamed of them.

In many regions, advertisements of foreign cities and technologies have generated a sense of inferiority that has discouraged even the most talented traditional craftspeople from continuing their trades.

Nowhere in the dialogue are these traditional lines of innovation labeled ‘science’ or ‘engineering’. Instead, they are called ‘history’, ‘art’, or ‘culture’, put in museums rather than studied in workshops. The great irrigation systems of the Incas that allowed them to flood the Ollantaytambo valley (Peru), drowning their conquistador rivals, have not made their way into contemporary texts on sustainable agriculture.

Valley beneath Ollantaytambo, Peru. Photo:Luke Redmond.

Our task is to inspire confidence within communities to recognize the contemporary usefulness and future potential of their design traditions. We do not want to preserve cultures, but rather to reinvigorate them.

Although all our efforts aim towards this goal, one is deserving of special attention, our engineering workshops run by One Earth Design’s (OED’s) Chief Engineer, Amy Qian.

Amy Qian holds up disassembled early SolSource 3-in-1 prototype in MITERS.

The daughter of two computer scientists, Qian began her career as a mechanical engineer as an eight year old; by whittling pointy sticks in her backyard. She graduated to carpentry with power tools in her garage, then to the metal shops of her high school and the robot building laboratories of MIT (Media Lab).

Qian’s passion for practice and design has never waivered because “it has given [her] the power to build tangible solutions for the problems [she is] presented with”. Now, she is working to inspire that same passion in others and to empower those around her to engineer solutions for their own communities.

Last week, Qian held a series of design workshops that seemed to be destined for failure. A landslide blocked her way into the city for the workshop, forcing her to spend an extra hour crossing the nearby river and finding a car to take her the rest of the way. At the markets, none of the vendors wanted to sell a duffel-bag full of wood to a woman, and for various reasons the location of the workshop had to be changed three times just hours before the sessions began.

Finally, the group gathered. The son and daughter of a carpenter who had been sent away to school as young children, two women’s group leaders from farming families, and a nomadic man who started a rural education association huddled around Qian, listening attentively to her explanations of wood working tools and design principles. Then, they built.

This is what they had to say after completing the woodworking portion of the workshop:

This is a small start but, to us, it is a beautiful one.

The Plateau Cultural Initiative

With used cameras, recorders, and computers in hand, PCI’s students have found ways of keeping their diverse cultures alive by documenting knowledge that is being lost, and by seeking ways to employ these traditional wisdoms in adapting to changing global circumstances.

For the past two days, we have been teaching these students how to build their own websites so that they can display their work. Although it took us years to learn HTML, CSS, and PHP, these students—many of whom have only recently learned how to use computers—were able to understand the process of making a website and creating content of their own with remarkable speed. One student had already mastered six human languages (Kham, Amdo, Namuyi, Yi, Mandarin, and English) when he entered our workshop and is now well on his way to adding three computer languages to his repertoire.

Although the students were excellent, we realized that our teaching left much to be desired. We found our initial lecture-style workshop format to be ineffective. Employing smaller topic-based work stations with hands-on activities proved a better method. The topics we covered were:

How to start a simple Website:
1) Rent a domain name
2) Rent server web space from a web host
3) Decide on a content management system and install it
4) Transfer information to servers
5) Download a website theme
6) Enter Content
7) HTML, CSS, and PHP for content and theme manipulation

[Our instructional materials (videos, screenshots, and handouts) will be posted on our website shortly. We are interested in working with others to develop good training materials. Please send us suggestions.]

Hard economic times have hit rural students, like PCI’s members, the hardest. With few job opportunities, one student wrote, “Seeing so many unemployed graduated students in the past made me realize that I must have a skill that others don’t have in order to find a job and I must help others know that I have this skill by making a website”.

Many students also wanted to help the world know more about their local traditions and ways of life. They were sad to see things changing so fast and to realize that so much of their grandparents’ knowledge has not been passed on to their parents.

Still more students wanted to create new knowledge through online tools. One student is working to create an online tagging system for four languages not included in the global forum. A team of students will work together to translate Wikipedia into local languages. One student will work to create an online learning platform for languages currently not taught by mainstream texts. Another student wants to develop a market price transparency system and use cell phone SMS messaging to ensure that rural farmers can sell their produce for a fair price.

Some may wonder why I wrote ICT for D in the title of this post. We are not inventing new communication technologies nor distributing cell phones to rural communities that never had them before. Instead, the goal of these workshops is to teach people how to use communication technologies to create their own online tools; ones that can help them implement local solutions and exchange ideas globally.

***

The Plateau Cultural Initiative is struggling to stay alive in today’s difficult economic climate. You can help by:

1) Donating your used cameras, recorders, and computers
2) Hosting an exhibition of their photographs, music, and writing
3) Financially supporting their work

Please contact me if you are interested in helping out in any of these ways, and stay tuned for links to PCI’s up-and-coming websites!

One Earth Designs (OED) was founded in 2007 by Catlin Powers and Scot Frank ( OED website; OED blog; OED facebook page; Twitter @OneEarthDesigns). Catlin will post on Mondays and Wednesdays. You can also find her on Twitter @CatlinPowers.

Young ‘cowboys’ after playing with camera (they took some pretty good pictures of me too). Photo: Scot Frank.

Upon closer inspection, however, it would become apparent that these were various minorities wearing a wide range of traditional clothing, and that the image of ‘Cowboys & Indians’ was one projected onto locals due to our familiarity with Country Western movies.

Woman in traditional headdress. Photo: Scot Frank

Throughout our history in this region, there have been many such misperceptions, both on our part and that of the local communities. For example, we once spent a week evaluating drinking water well installments in a nomadic winter settlement where water was extremely scarce. One of our team members declined to wash his face on the first day in order to save water. His home-stay family thought that washing was against his culture and proceeded not to offer him water for the rest of the week. After several days, he felt so dirty that he washed his face with his canteen water. One of the village children saw this and ran back to his family shouting, “The foreigner is washing his face! The foreigner is washing his face!”

Such misunderstandings are inevitable when projects cross cultures but, having guided several teams of students through international field work, our experience is that these misunderstandings can have humorous rather than deleterious outcomes if students follow a select set of guidelines. To the seasoned international traveler or development worker, these guidelines may seem obvious, but we hope that they will be useful to newcomers looking to form connections and build trust in unfamiliar lands.

How can students attempting international projects during a single winter or summer vacation hope to make a positive (rather than a negative) impact?

1. Engage in change for the right reasons. When you begin an international project, make sure that you honestly want to help others and are not just engaging because you feel pity, superiority, or distaste for another’s way of life, or because that’s what all your friends are doing. Since we are all connected through the earth we share, we cannot survive without helping other living beings. So, help others because that is our only choice.
2. Orient yourself to the culture. It’s not a passive process. This is the age of the Internet (digital natives galore). There is no excuse for not knowing the historical and cultural context of the communities with which you are working. Please take the initiative to be an active learner and don’t be afraid to ask questions both before and after you arrive. Otherwise, you and your local partners are in for a not-so-healthy dose of culture shock.
3. Communicate, check for precedent, and support local projects. If you are working on a development project, find out about similar projects that others have done in your region. Contact them for background on the topic and potential collaborations. These people can help you while you’re on the ground. If possible, establish contact with community members beforehand, but don’t expect this to mean that you can forego formalities on the ground.
4. Practice cultural sensitivity, respect, and awareness. Obliviousness will earn you no friends when you arrive in the midst of a new culture. Stay aware of your surroundings, take your cues from others’ behavior, and—to start out with—err on the side of sensitivity and respect rather than informal overtures of friendship.
5. Always ask permission and heed advice. If you want to do something that you don’t see others doing, please ask for permission first. If your hosts say no, don’t do it. Please use common sense.
6. Have a polite default option. Inevitably, you will find yourself in situations in which you have no idea what to do. Have a back-up plan, the polite option that you fall back on whenever the ‘correct’ option is not clear. It’s important that you try.
7. Respect host culture, but don’t let go of your own (they’ll find it entertaining). If you pretend that you’re a local, you’ll be disappointed in yourself and others will see you as false. Just be yourself and respect your hosts. We are all people, and most of us are pretty forgiving. Your unusual thoughts and behaviors will provide entertainment in the absence of television.
8. Have clear and realistic expectations about your own role. You cannot save the world by yourself. Accept this and work with local people to find out how you can realistically contribute to the efforts that they are already undertaking.
9. Know your field instruments and procedures. If you are doing field research, it is best to be familiar with your equipment beforehand. Read the instructions (and bring a copy). Try using your equipment a few times to make sure its working. Familiarize yourself with operating parameters and storage/transportation precautions. Practice working with any necessary software. You don’t want any equipment to explode or malfunction.
   For the sake of data analysis, be sure to decide on a systematic data recording plan beforehand. Come up with a consistent labeling scheme for samples (make sure your permanent markers don’t run in the rain; the black color is most permanent). Keep a field notebook with dates, times, GPS locations, photo filenames, and other relevant notes. Setting up equations ahead of time ensures that you don’t forget to record any key information.
10. Prep translators so that you know that you’re getting the right point across. Avoid sending the wrong message by working with your translators ahead of time to make sure that they have understood the nature of your work and questions.
11. No false promises. Do what you say you’ll do and promise no more. You cause more harm by promising to come back with a solution and not showing up than you do by admitting that you are not sure whether you will be able to come back.
12. Familiarize yourself with the range of solutions that others have implemented in the situation you are investigating. When you discover the cause of a problem (e.g. bacterial contamination in a water source), be ready to tell the community about the ways that others have addressed this problem and what options have worked under which circumstances.
13. Don’t proffer solutions with certainty unless you are certain about them. If you know that a certain solution is absolutely the best one, great! Usually, however, this is not the case. Communicate as much as you know about possible solutions, but be honest about your uncertainty and, in many cases, your lack of expertise.
14. Don’t begin a project unless there is a plan for continuity. Follow-through and continuity are imperative to project success and creating positive impact. It’s not enough to characterize a problem. You must take the next step to facilitate the implementation of an appropriate solution. If you can’t continue the project yourself, find someone locally who can and partner with them.

We hope that this list of guidelines will help you create positive impact in the world. Sharing three cups of tea is often not enough, but there are concrete steps you can take to channel your time, patience, and altruism into building friendships and partnerships rather than burning bridges (even if unintentional). We want to build this into a good guideline list for newcomers to international development. Please let us know what we’ve missed or gotten wrong.

One Earth Designs (OED) was founded in 2007 by Catlin Powers and Scot Frank ( OED website; OED blog; OED facebook page; Twitter @OneEarthDesigns). Catlin will post on Mondays and Wednesdays. You can also find her on Twitter @CatlinPowers.

Nomads herd yaks across high-altitude pastures, photo: Scot Frank.

Across much of Qinghai, the air is well endowed with the fine soil particles that the howling wind lifts so easily off the mountainsides. In the winter, the land is a watercolor of frosted blue and orange. Bitterly cold and dry, there is little snow to cover the frozen patches of high-altitude grass and iron-rich soil that crunch beneath human feet and crackle in the wake of the horse and yak herds. In the summers, the earth is pure gold. The land is covered with a bright yellow carpet of canola flowers interrupted only by the naked red mountains forcing their way into the sky.

Qinghai’s inhospitable terrain, its occasional ethnic conflicts, and its low rates of literacy and industry have led many Chinese to label it the ‘wild west’ where only the intrepid will venture.

Friendship and Conflict in Diversity

Always a land of diversity, modern Qinghai is home to the Zangzu, Hui, Salar, Monguor, and Han. These diverse ethnic groups have lived together and depended on one another for decades. Although there are conflicts from time to time, in the villages, we often find ourselves singing and telling stories around the hearth with people from all these groups, present as equal members of their community.

Traditional Pumi Song (video), recording: Plateau Music Project

Yet, media continues to publicize Qinghai as a violent land of ethnic conflict and governments still maintain a wary eye. Past development work has often focused on improving living standards for a single ethnic group alone, exacerbating this tense climate.

Does Education Yield Progress or Disparity?

Although UNESCO has recognized the government’s admirable efforts to increase literacy, Qinghai’s literacy rate remains one of the lowest in China due to the linguistic diversity of its population and its mountainous geography. Finding teachers that speak all of Qinghai’s major languages is a rarity and it is much more common for schools to give instruction in Mandarin only. This puts children from the other language groups at a disadvantage and often deters them from further study.

Nomadic winter school in Qinghai Province, photo: Scot Frank

The rural mountain populations are also highly dispersed, meaning that children often travel long distances to attend school. Some families cannot afford to have their children take so much time out of household chores and so keep them out of school. Others decide to board their children (very expensive). Because the education is only in Mandarin, these children forget how to speak their native tongue and cannot communicate with their families when they return. While learning book knowledge, these children forget knowledge relevant to rural life such as how to herd, farm, and do important household chores. When other villagers see this, they are afraid to send their children to school. Thus, education—although a potentially powerful tool for increasing living standards—often contributes to a sense of inferiority and disparity among Qinghai’s rural population.

Industry

Unlike much of eastern China, Qinghai is not an industrial powerhouse. Its cash economy instead depends on mineral extracts: petroleum, natural gas, coal, and nonferrous metals (e.g. gold). Most of its inhabitants are small-scale farmers or nomads who contract out as miners during the summer to earn what is often their family’s only cash income.

Coal shovelers, photo: Scot Frank

Qinghai is only slowly tamed by the tremendous global forces of industrialization and urbanization. For the time being, it remains the ‘Wild Wild West’ and little confidence is placed in its people’s ability to innovate their way into the future in peace and with dignity. By offering people a way to channel their energies into improving local living standards through applied science and engineering, we hope that our work can build friendship and peace while improving the well-being of humans and nature.

One Earth Designs (OED) was founded in 2007 by Catlin Powers and Scot Frank (OED website; OED facebook page; Twitter @OneEarthDesigns). Catlin will post on Mondays and Wednesdays. You can also find her on Twitter @catlinpowers.

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Crowds exit Beijing’s Temple of Heaven, photo: Shreyans Bhansali

The 25 hour train ride from Beijing to Xining (W. China) is a welcome reprieve from the hot, hustle and bustle of China’s capital city. It is not like the next leg of the train, the additional day-long ride to Lhasa with its shimmering trails of altitude sickness tracing the way to the bathrooms. Nor is it like the 70 hour bus route from Leh (the northernmost city in India) to Kathmandu (the capital of Nepal) where your tires freeze into the glacial ice and you spend hours breaking them out only to repeat the process a few hundred meters down the road.

So much of traveling is taken up by transportation. It is during these times that one sees the raw veins of nations: the flow of people and the flow of goods, the places that are connected and those that are notably left unconnected. The symbolism of this particular train, which connects Beijing to Lhasa, brings me to ponder the history of transportation and the potential of well-done development to replace transportation systems as a more benevolent tool for governments to meet their agendas.

Qinghai-Tibet Railway, photo: Reurinkjan.

Historically, transportation has enjoyed a powerful role as a tool either to unite populations or to divide and conquer them. Railways united continents but were also used to overthrow Native American nations in the United States. Roads and automobiles made transportation available to the masses, but have also been used to control the flow of goods and cash during regional conflicts like the Ghorka uprisings (1980’s, 2008) in India. Finally, the airplane has increased global awareness and cross-cultural friendships while also enabling large-scale bombings.

Perhaps the largest impact of increased transportation has been the migration of people to form ‘melting pots’ which governments often leverage to their own benefit. Putting one ethnic group in charge of a region where a different ethnic group comprises the majority ensures that these groups fight amongst each other rather than uniting against central powers.

Governments use these political and transportation-based tactics because they, along with the people they govern, want to build strong, healthy nations that can grow and thrive peacefully. Rebellions, however, arise when people feel that their basic living standards are not met by their governments, the very same feeling of neglect that has arisen from divide and conquer tactics. Building strong, healthy nations, thus, might be more efficiently accomplished by both governments and citizens turning their efforts towards sustainable development as a method of improving living standards.

In Beijing, we met with many people working towards improving the living standards of the Chinese people. Dr. Gwen Zahner, a professor of epidemiology at Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, is working relentlessly to increase rural access to books and health education. Dr. Yang Xudong at Tsinghua University has dedicated himself to improving rural energy and Brendan Acord at AES is working to expand China’s large-scale renewable energy capacity.

The journey from Beijing to Xining has given us time to reflect on these inspiring individuals and on the role of development in peace building. Now in the western Chinese province of Qinghai, the ‘we’ of former posts has expanded to the we that incorporates our local staff and the villagers with whom we work. Thus, we hope that, through our work to improve living standards, we can contribute to peace both between people and their governments and between people and the environment.

One Earth Designs (OED) was founded in 2007 by Catlin Powers and Scot Frank (OED website; OED facebook page; Twitter @OneEarthDesigns). Catlin will post on Mondays and Wednesdays. You can also find her on Twitter @catlinpowers.

The anger was palpable as we took our places in the village leader’s house alongside the council of elders. The villagers had decided to raise money to install the latrines because an NGO had told them that going to the bathroom outside was the cause of the recent increase in childhood diarrhea. The villager’s raised half the money and the NGO built the latrines. In the winter, however, the villagers were still forced to go to the bathroom outside because the latrine’s evacuation doors were too small to allow the removal of the frozen feces. The villagers wanted to know how to build their own latrines so that they didn’t need to rely on what they saw as foreign incompetence. They had heard that we could help.

^^^

I first visited this region in 2001, but it was the words of a young woman whom I met in 2007 that stuck in my mind and led me to co-found One Earth Designs along with Scot Frank.

“When I was little”, she said. “I asked my mother why she was so short. She told me that I too would be short because of the heavy burdens of fuel and water that we women carry.”

As the young woman showed me around her village, I realized that her words did not just describe the water jugs and dung baskets that women hauled up the mountain to their homes. Women also carried the burden of lung disease from their smoky stoves and the burden of caring for their children who frequently had diarrhea from contaminated water. In addition, long hours spent collecting these daily necessities prevented women from improving their social stature because they had no time to attend school.

In the barter economy, all members of the household had contributed to subsistence. With the arrival of the cash economy, however, women had been left with time consuming chores while men became the money makers. Life was difficult because families only had one primary income earner.

For agricultural villages, life was even more difficult in the seasons when the sleet came early, unexpectedly, and ruined all the crops. It had happened more and more in recent years and some of the villagers had begun to whisper that the earth would end soon. People had angered the elements and soon the great storms would come to break the earth apart.

For the nomadic clans, it was the little rabbit-like pika that diminished livelihoods. With the warming climate, pika had migrated to higher elevations, eating the grasslands and leaving little food for the yak herds and sheep flocks. The destruction of the grasslands also meant a decrease in the dung and wild brush that had served as the traditional fuels.

The specifics were different, but I had seen this before in the high-altitude communities of the Andes, the Townships of South Africa, and the lowlands of Brazil, India, and Vietnam. Global trade had changed the social structures of communities, global climate change had drastically altered the environments around them, and global industry had led local governments to try—often brutally—to rid their countries of ‘unsightly’ things such as the rural way of life and the slums on the outskirts of cities.

The controversial economist, Julian Simon, wrote that global population growth was a good thing because it meant more minds to innovate better solutions. But the communities that I am describing have largely been excluded from global solution making. Given the long history of innovation in the Himalayan region, I wanted to know why so many villages were seeking help from outside rather than innovating independently.

The answers I received came down to a matter of confidence. People were well aware of the hardships of their own lives. The images of foreign technologies and lifestyles, on the other hand, always looked so glamorous and happy. By comparison, rural Himalayan communities felt inferior. People no longer believed in their ability to build, fix, innovate, and understand the world around them because their culture and its knowledge had been so challenged and degraded by a rather one-sided dialogue with the outside.

Scot Frank and I co-founded One Earth Designs in order to complete this dialogue and inspire confidence in local innovation as a way forward in a rapidly changing world. We have also found ourselves gaining confidence through this work, confidence in the human ability to help each other in the way that we each wish to be helped, and confidence to believe in a better world no matter how many times our lives or egos are threatened along the way. As Jacqueline Novogratz, founder of the Acumen Fund, wrote in her book, The Blue Sweater (2009), local “ownership of the dream” lies at the core of positive change.

One Earth Designs (OED) was founded in 2007 by Catlin Powers and Scot Frank (OED website; OED facebook page; Twitter @OneEarthDesigns). Catlin will post on Mondays and Wednesdays. You can also find her on Twitter @catlinpowers.

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“From study after study, a theme emerged. It was like a drumbeat, faint and barely recognizable at first, and then louder and louder as the findings rolled in. It didn’t seem to matter what the topic of the research was. Its underlying message was nearly always the same: disaster-affected communities wanted a chance to guide their own recovery – and humanitarian programs (would) probably work better if they (did) so.” – Oxfam 2009 Report

Oxfam was speaking of a people impoverished by war and natural disaster, but the same is true of all communities. Readers may shrug this off as being an obvious and easy task, but it is not. For communities struggling to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances that they themselves have had no say in, reclaiming the self-confidence to decide how to proceed into the future can often be more daunting than simply continuing to live amidst life-threatening conditions. Our job as change-makers is not to make decisions on behalf of these communities once disasters have struck, but to maintain a steady effort to empower people with the self-confidence to make change themselves.

One Earth Designs aims to do this by democratizing science and engineering. This summer we are focusing our efforts on four programs:

The SolSource 3-in-1 (initiated in 2007) is a solar cooking, heating, and electricity-generating device developed in conjunction with Himalayan villagers who were interested in designing a more portable solar cooker that would still be wind-sturdy and capable of stir-frying. This summer we will be working with recently urbanized communities to refine the manufacture of this device for local income generation. Find out more on WorldChanging, Discovery Channel, and the SolSource website. You can also follow updates on twitter. [Funders: St. Andrews Prize for the Environment, Clinton Global Initiative, MIT IDEAS, Muhammad Yunus Innovation Challenge, Pamela Daniels]

Catlin Powers and Drogar Jyid with SolSource 3-in-1 [Photo by Scot Frank]

HeatSource Textiles (initiate in 2009) offer a renewable means of staying warm at sub-zero temperatures and were developed in conjunction with Himalayan pastoralists who found that climate change was rapidly eradicating their traditional means of staying warm during herding. The design employs the phase change properties of locally-available materials to provide a mobile form of energy storage and controlled heat delivery. The textiles are fully reusable and can also be recharged with solar energy when people aren’t wearing them. Find out more on the HeatSource website and follow it on twitter. [Funders: Lemelson-MIT International Technology Award]

HeatSource Textiles

The Global Citizen Water Initiative (Citizen Water) (initiated in 2008) works with NGOs, universities, and health clinics to teach villagers how to test their own water sources using simple, inexpensive kits. The results of these tests help match water sources with appropriate local treatment providers. In addition, the initiative’s website—although still in the development phase—will provide an online map of this data for use by researchers and health regulators. Find out more on the Citizen Water website and follow it on twitter. [Funders: Google.org, Tides Foundation, MIT TauBetaPi, MIT IDEAS, the Baruch Family, Legatum Center]

Drogar Jyid runs Citizen Water training seminar [Photo by Scot Frank]

We are also developing an illustrated Applied Science and Engineering Reader Series (ASER) for rural schools with chapters on topics such as waste management, water quality, indoor air pollution, latrines, solar cookers, greenhouses, and water treatment/supply methods. Find out more on the ASER website.

The task of enabling others to make their own change is as frustrating as it is intangible. This work cannot be accomplished by handing out food or money, nor through infrastructure development or technology transfer alone. It requires a deep respect between people. Most of all, it requires a willingness to work and learn alongside one another and from each other.

One Earth Designs (OED) was founded in 2007 by Catlin Powers (me) and Scot Frank (OED website; OED facebook page; Twitter @OneEarthDesigns). I will be posting on Mondays and Wednesdays. You can also find me on Twitter @catlinpowers.