Engineering: issues, challenges and opportunities for development ...

ENGINEERING: ISSUES CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR DEVELOPMENThard labour, but this was getting away from the Ghandianmodel. Financially it was eventually shown that the 12-spindlepedal charkha could only be viable within the subsidizedkhadi sector, but the 24-spindle motorized charkha could beviable, though would find it hard to compete with mill yarn ongrounds of quality.As far as the cotton pre-processing technology was concerned,the review in 1986 concluded, ‘Unfortunately the machine productionachieved little other than the production of scaleddownversions of a card and drawframe to high standards ofengineering along with a poorly manufactured blowroom.’ Itdid not work. The review concluded, ‘the Textile Programmeappears to have fallen into a “widget trap” – “widgets” weresought as solutions for problems before the search for a technological“fix” was adequately justified.’Overall commentsAlthough small, these three small-scale manufacturing technologieseach still required a substantial investment, whichwas beyond the scope of an individual living on around twodollars a day. They might be small-scale in relation to conventionalplant, but not relative to the assets of micro-enterprisesor smallholder farmers. Though cooperative ownership wasan option – and many OPS sugar plants in India started ascooperatives – for the impoverished, such factories could onlymean either wage employment or a market for their agriculturalproduce.Attention shifted therefore as ITDG paid greater attention tosocio-economic factors, redressing previous neglect of thesocial, institutional and economic context; attention shiftedto technology development for micro- and small enterprises.Here there were some successes, for instance the tray drier andfibre cement roofing tiles. The latter are now in widespreaduse in much of the developing world. Moreoever, tray drierswere successfully developed in Peru by a small enterprise, andtransferred to other countries.Participatory Technology DevelopmentThe next phase in ITDG’s approach to technology and povertyreduction saw a focus on Participatory Technology Development(PTD). PTD is now a well-established practice in the fieldof agriculture and can trace its origins back to trials in farmers’fields by agricultural research stations with a shift, though noteverywhere, towards more and more of the experimentationinto the hands of the farmers themselves. But the concept ofPTD applies also to other sectors; and arguably the beta testingof software by IT companies is a form of PTD.This change during the 1980s – particularly the late 1980s– towards technology users being directly involved in technologydevelopment rather than recipients of products, wasassisted by two trends in thinking. First, there was greaterunderstanding of the process of innovation that takes placeby small-scale farmers and within small enterprises; how theylearn and apply new knowledge. It was recognized that technicalchange is generally evolutionary and incremental. Radicalinvention is the exception rather than the rule. Technicalchange, by and large, consists of very small, minor adjustmentsto the way people do things based on ‘what people are doing’,on the knowledge and experience that they have, and the skillsthey possess to carry them out.The second change in thinking was a great move towards participatoryapproaches in the practice of international development.Participatory techniques (such as PRA, RRA or PLA) thatrecognize the value of existing knowledge and skills becameacceptable methods for all kinds of planning and field work,and quite quickly became almost a discipline in themselves.The idea of involving people in the development or adaptationof the technologies they use fitted into this very well. A goodexample of PTD, featured in ITDG appeal literature for sometime with some success, was the donkey ploughs in Sudan.Ploughs in SudanIn the conflict in Darfur, large numbers of people have movedto refugee camps – the so-called ‘internally displaced people’(IDPs). This has always been a harsh environment to live in,but ITDG has been working in North Darfur for almost twodecades – for half of our forty years – where we have beensupporting the development of technologies used by smallscalefarmers. From the beginning, our approach has been towork with the farmers, enabling them to acquire new knowledgeabout alternative agricultural techniques, such as soil andwater conservation or pest management, and to try and getthem to test these new ideas for themselves.ITDG began working with small-scale farmers in Kebkabiya,North Darfur, in 1987 in collaboration with Oxfam. An initialreview of local tools and farmers’ needs prompted work on aprototype donkey-drawn plough. While the introduction ofanimal-drawn ploughs in the region goes back to the 1960s,the models available were too expensive for the great majorityof farmers.Actual plough designs were borrowed from existing designs,from two designs in particular: a wooden ard (scratch plough– a type of simple plough) and a steel mouldboard plough,which was a scaled-down version of a standard ox-plough,made suitable for donkeys. In Kebkabiya, the approach focusedon getting ploughs to farmers and letting them do the realexperimentation, rather than on the finer details of technicalspecification. This approach, or rather the plough design thatemerged from it, has generated some criticism from professionalagricultural engineers; but the farmers who carried outthe trials seemed satisfied. The approach meant that farmers156