World Challenge

BBC is currently having a World Challenge competition, where 12 grassroots innovations or small businesses for the public good operating in poor areas are identified , voted on, and the winner awarded.  One innovation that particularly interests me is the ram pump being implemented in the Philippines to pump water uphill up to 1,000 feet using only the energy from the water flowing downstream.

The BBC website says, "It's baffling how some inventions fail to achieve a tipping point. The hydraulic ram pump - which has been around for a couple of centuries. falls into this category."  I wonder how Edgerton would explain the failure of hydraulic pumps to be put to use in poor areas.  He might say that the Western world chose technologies able to transport greater quantities of water at the cost of traditional energy sources, so people have been trying to implement the same technologies in the poor world and finding them infeasible.  Perhaps the problem is that we view the 'developing' world as needing to catch up to the developed and so we try and implement developed-world technologies when really we should be finding creative ones tailored to the environment in which they are implemented.

Source: http://www.theworldchallenge.co.uk/2010-finalists-project08.php