Ask HN: Ideas for tech in developing countries? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Ideas for tech in developing countries?

48 pointscsytan51 comments

Dear HN,

My lab is looking for ideas, particularly in relation to developing countries. What sort of problems have you seen that we might be able to solve through technology?

About us: We are the Sustainable Engineering Lab at Columbia University (http://sel.columbia.edu/). We are a team of students, engineers, programmers and experts in renewable energy.

We've done work in Nigeria, Indonesia, Myanmar, India and a whole bunch of other places (http://sel.columbia.edu/projects/).

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"experts in renewable energy."

In a country like India, there is a huge problem to solve when it comes to basic necessity like Electricity for everyone. Specially in smaller towns and villages. Since you mentioned renewable energy, I am sure there is a huge potential there.

The problem is that the electricity grids (or transformers) are just not enough for everyone. So in many small towns/villages, they do something called "load shedding" and power cuts are frequent even if there is electricity available. Hardly there are areas where there are no transformers or grid but most of the times, they are not functional or just badly managed.

Find a way to create enough energy AND then channel it efficiently as well. You have a winner right there.

This is a huge problem that we're chipping away at.

I'm only starting to get involved in the energy group, but I know that we've had a project focused on providing off-grid solar energy (http://sharedsolar.org/), as well as some software to model the costs of grid rollout across countries such as Myanmar (http://networkplanner.modilabs.org/). The idea is that this research would later be used to back funding proposals from entities such as the World Bank.

If you can crack portable power supply using solar energy, there is a huge huge market here. For e.g. most parts of southern India are scorching hot most part of the year. Land is cheap in rural areas. Power cuts are common 8-10 hours a day during the summer. I really wish the government invested in solar grids - we really should be able to generate surplus electricity using solar.

This is an idea that I've been thinking about for a while now. One of the issues I couldn't figure out how to overcome was the need for more electricity as people get a taste of how electricity can change their lives. Since installation of the solar station is subsidized and the villagers are essentially only paying for electricity they use, unless what is being paid is more than the maintenance cost of the solar station there is no more money to expand the capacity unless you get grants from World Bank or other entities.

How do you make this a completely self sustaining model where expansion is built in to the model without charging the users more money than they can afford? Can you charge the power users more money than the basic user? e.g. if basic user is paying $10 to use X kilowatts and makes $15 in income from that electricity, then the power user who uses 10X kilowatts can be charged $140 under the presumption that the power user uses that extra electricity to generate an income > $150 for themselves. The profits can then be put back into expanding the solar station capacity.

Hi, I'm also from SEL. In addition to some of our work (which is generally about shared solar), some interesting companies that are thinking about (and providing their own solutions to) the financing question are http://www.selco-india.com/ and http://simpanetworks.com/ Not endorsing their work necessarily, but worth a look at, for someone interested in this stuff.

1) A version of Wikipedia / Appropedia (Mediawikis in general) which can be installed as an app (won't need further net access) on Firefox OS phones.

(2 gig on an SD card at point of manufacture vs. download costs.)

2) Sawyer filters: 170 litres a day, for a million litres of virus-purified water, for $120. But those straw filters... those are industrial-generic, aren't they? Cheaper ways? (see Safe Water Trust for an example)

3) Craigslist for refugee camps / crisis areas.

4) My own project, http://hexayurt.com can _always_ use bright sparks!

Enjoy!

Checkout http://www.kiwix.org/

This started off as an offline wikipedia project at Geekcorps Mali and now has been adopted as an official Wikimedia project.

> 4) My own project, http://hexayurt.com can _always_ use bright sparks!

Very neat. Thanks for sharing!

An idea of mine that I would like to work on in the future when I have the time and resources is a "Swiss Army knife" style tool to provide some essentials to a small group. The objective is to provide electricity, rainwater collection, potable water, and food preparation/preservation using a system whose parts are not valuable enough individually to be a target of theft. Feel free to use any part of the idea you find interesting or useful. It's an interconnected system, but I'll explain some features separately:

Wind Turbine Structure: Two vertical axis turbines whose blades are hollow (containers) are connected to a circular belt. A tower structure holds the belt in a position such that when the weight ratio of the top turbine vs. the bottom passes a certain threshold, gravity will rotate the belt until the heavier turbine rests at the bottom. The belt will turn a dynamo style generator. While at the bottom, the turbine container will have a plug pressed open and any water inside will drain wherever directed. So on dry and windy days, the turbines will generate electricity. On rainy days, the dynamo will generate electricity while the rainwater is harvested. A great way to store the electricity without an expensive lead-battery is to charge personal electronics or lighting systems (for use at night), and use the rest for refrigeration and ice creation.

Solar Radiation Collection: A semi-spherical lens on top of the wind turbine tower will direct solar radiation inside the hollow tower structure toward a system of lenses and mirrors that focus and collimate light onto the heating element of the Water Distillation structure. The focused ray will be contained within an enclosed structure along its entire path to avoid injury. When the solar radiation is not necessary for water distillation or food preparation, it should be utilized to generate electricity. I don't know the best way to do it without using PV cells or a heat engine with parts that may be too valuable for thieves to resist.

Water Distillation/Food Preparation Structure: The water distillation process will work similar to this image: http://ep.yimg.com/ty/cdn/solaqua/stilldiag.gif However, the solar radiation will not enter from above. Instead the focused ray from the wind turbine tower will heat a metal heating element positioned underneath, but in contact with the dirty water container. The dirty water container will be a u-shaped tower such that a rectangular metal box can be inserted into the the center. At least three sides of the box will be in direct contact with the dirty water container, and the bottom will be near the heating element. The metal box will work like an oven to cook food when the heating element brings the dirty water to boil. Because the structure does not need solar radiation to enter from above, the top of the structure will be a solar food dehydration chamber.

Infant mortality is definitely one. There's a team from Stanford who developed a baby warmer for areas where electricity is an issue http://blog.ted.com/2010/07/09/fellows_friday_4/ http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_chen_a_warm_embrace_that_saves... Even if you go for a different problem, it's an interesting case to look into method-wise - I read somewhere else about how they iterated based on feedback from local community but I can't find it...

A cheap Bluetooth enabled Braille display would be a good option although would only serve a small segment of the population in developing countries. For more info see

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refreshable_braille_display

All current models I have seen are over $1000, over $2000 for anything of a decent size. Something that could use Bluetooth to connect to old iPhones, low end Android devices, and windows computers running the open source screen reader NVDA could be very useful in countries where government does not subsidize the purchase of expensive assistive technology.

This could be a starting point

http://www.raspberrypi.org/mudra-a-braille-dicta-teacher/

I saw that but unless I missed something when looking at the github page I didn't see any information on the device they hooked up to the GPIO pins.

That's their email address from github:

eamanshrivastava@gmail.com

Hey. We're currently using a makeshift braille cell made from solenoids.

For more info : contactus@projectmudra.com Cheers!

It's interesting that you mention that. Yesterday I was visiting the neighboring teaching lab and a student was working on making a cheap braille reader. They were using a series of parallel rods that can slide up and down.

Here's a (poor) rendition of how it works: http://mondrian.io/?p=NlAQ8x

As someone who is totally blind I would be interested in this if it ever got to a somewhat usable prototype stage.

India would be a good place to test it: "Of the 37 million people across the globe who are blind, over 15 million are from India."(http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/India-has-largest-b...)

Much of Colombia is mountainous, and (in my experience) most towns in the mountains are situated by high-volume rivers and streams.

I'm told that 50 years ago or so it was quite common for small towns to have hydro-power, but then the government strung up wires from far away coal-powered electricity plants, and that was the end of that.

Perhaps such towns could be incentivized to install/reinstall hydro power, and achieve some degree of energy self-sufficiency. I have no idea whether the incentive could reasonably be price-based, as coal seems cheap.

Additionally, the sun is almost always shining in the Colombian Andes, and I've never seen a solar panel.

(I'm from Colombia).

Not only have potential for solar panel, but also wind turbines (in the north, mainly).

One problem? The electricity is cheap.

Better public transport. I have kind of an idea in my head, that might be useful to you.

How technology can help?

- Most of people who do not have their own drive, rely on public transport which is 'generally' overcrowded to reach to their destination.

- Now there are people who have vehicle (mostly car) for going to office (downtown like area) which has space for other 3-4 guys?

- I always see those empty seats and people on the other side of road waiting for a bus/train (which might be going to same place as that car).

- So if we can provide some way of communication between these two, wouldn't that be awesome? As they do travel on approximate same time (like morning 9-10) to same places.

- I do think people having vehicle don't have any problem giving ride to others who are sharing same or nearby offices. If they don't have to stop at too many places and wait.

How can we implement this? (just a suggestion)

- We can divide the whole city in some kind of hexagonal area <cellular towers?>, and then a simple mobile app can connect people travelling to same 'hexagon' maybe?

- Each hexagon should cover only 'walkable' area. So if I drop someone anywhere in that hexagon, his/her destination is at max 8-10 mins walk from there. Otherwise he/she might have to use other ways of transport which is not convenient.

I think it might change the way people travel in big cities.

It would be true People Powered Public Transport then! :)

Let me know your views on this.

This is kind of the idea behind shared taxis, which are sometimes called colectivos or jitneys or a hundred other names. They have a semi-fixed route and will drop you near where you want to be. They don't leave their stop until they have enough people to fill the taxi. I think they're usually independently operated. They're already quite popular in some countries, South America and Africa mostly. I used them in Chile and it was a really nice system, fitting the niche between taxis and buses quite well. However, you had to know the name of the neighborhood you wanted to go to, and there was no automation.

I honestly think they could be useful in the US for commuting purposes. Everyone going to the same office park from the same neighborhood could charter a shared taxi and relax instead of drive. Cost would have to be low. I'd use it. Hell, I even had idle thoughts about trying to create it. However, I have neither the capital nor the expertise to make this happen.

Edit: also see Demand Responsive Transit (DRT). It's the western name for this, and it's been tried before for various uses. Getting disabled people to the doctor is a common use in the US. Various European cities have tried this for getting people to train stations. In my opinion, it's never been marketed the right way. Also, the big bus/taxi companies that have tried DRT didn't have the vision or will to make it happen. Nor do the municipal governments that have tried.

Great! Thanks.

Road fatality rates! Here in Costa Rica about 500 people per year are killed (pop. 4 - 5 mil, and that's not even high for developing countries) and the majority of it stems from a cultural and complete disregard for road rules which is pretty common in all of these countries down here. In bad countries the rates are significantly worse.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-re...

Internet speed and unreliability make it tricky for webapps to do much good. Distributed web servers that work on local area networks and sync data asynchronously with something like AWS could be HUGE. I've been working on a side project that uses this model. Stick a raspberry pi in an office or clinic. Have users hit that server. Page loads instantly. Resin.io & Docker could make it easier to deploy code to these servers. I'd be happy to chat about this or other ideas more. Very important and neglected area!

I am thinking about this a lot and I would love to start a discussion ! I am sending you an email.

I absolutely agree with this. Having spent time working in Kenya, frameworks for locally hosted apps which refresh their data during rare spates of internet connectivity would be helpful for a wide range of applications.... Along with easy out-of-the-box servers for LANs.

Would this be a hardware cache + proxy that's specific to a particular app?

Some interesting work in this area has also been done by Jay Chen: http://cs.nyu.edu/~jchen/

A mechanical turk vending machine. A walk up terminal that allows the user to complete mechanical turk type tasks to earn a small sum that is paid out in cash immediately.

I like the idea a lot. It's like a digital service version of the reverse vending machines for recycling bottles and cans.

Former SEL team member here, SEL also produces a lot of open source code, for background and inspiration checkout their github projects, https://github.com/SEL-columbia

I have a meta-proposal. Random westerners are a terrible source of ideas - you should talk to people from developing countries and if possible go there. The local knowledge will be 100x more useful than anything we can come up with.

Its would be kind of like rich politicians from privileged background deciding how the rest of the unwashed masses should live their lives. Oh, wait...

Guessing the down voters don't live in the UK.

A big problem is keeping people in school instead of letting them go work to support their families. Can technology solve this? Maybe. Perhaps when an ed-tech company wants to test the effectiveness of their product, maybe they could pay students in developing countries to test their products instead of dropping out of school. This might be cheaper than doing similar research in developed countries.

Education research could happen in developing nations instead of developed countries. If the alternative is no education or jobs that are dangerous, this approach might make a lot of sense.

I wonder if the most efficient way to do this is to simply subsidize the child's earnings for the family on the promise that the child will be sent to school.

Perhaps something to do with food? My fellow African brothers seem to lack that, even though a ton of crops the Europeans (and other parts of the world) eat are grown here.

Food and water is where I would start. You give the people that and one of humanities biggest problems is solved (of course, not "giving it" in that sense, as that would be the same as any other charity just giving stuff away with no sustainability in mind).

Pay as you go solar. Payment done through mobile SMS banking networks like mPesa. Each unit has a SIM card to receive commands.

Considering solar panel costs are < $500 kW and Chinese lithium iron phosphate batteries are < $400/kWh, a financially sustainable business model is entirely possible.

Mobile operators are the ideal vendors but lack imagination. That's where you come in.

We're doing that with the Shared Solar project (http://sharedsolar.org/). Some parts of the project were spun off into a for-profit business by former lab members. Interestingly, although SMS payments were built into the system, no one used them as it was easier to just walk down the street and buy credits with cash.

Wow! Is this only on a community level or do you have household units as well?

Check out http://extreme.stanford.edu/ for some amazing examples developed at Stanford. I really like the story behind a recent YC graduate, Noora Health (http://www.noorahealth.org/).

This is a great collection of projects. Thanks!

Hi Columbia!

We are building a free opensource app to manage the security of people mostly present or operating in the developing world. It's called Umbrella. Would would love to speak some more with you guys and see how we might cooperate with you. Check us out at www.secfirst.org and reach out!

All the best, -SF

A little-bit off topic: The hard problem in developing countries is getting the idea implemented in a feasible and simple way.

Advances in logistics, transportation and information flow which can be used by the local population in the most simplistic way without compromising on equality

We at Digital Green need an SMS based data collection tool as well as mobile solutions for low cost devices. Any tech which is user friendly and seemlessly work in online and offline would be awesome to have too. Please contact sreenivasula@digitalgreen.org for further communication

i don't see any link on your pages to them, so just saying.. i wonder if kobo toolkit, open data kit, and related projects are of any use to you..

We tried using open data kit but because of lack of expertise we could not roll out the product.

a low bandwidth version of a video learning website (such as kahn academy) would be very valuable. a poor education system is a big problem in most developing countries. unfortunately this problem is difficult to address with an education alternative (eg. kahn acdmy) due to lack of quality internet infrustructure.

free wireless craigslist like system for local people rpi computers for everyone

Is it possible to build a cheap, distributable kit to test the quality of a newly-laid road? Let me elaborate: in rural economies, the quality of roads has a direct impact on prosperity. Within India, richer states almost always have very good rural roads - helps get produce to market on time, people to hospitals, etc. Unfortunately, road construction is often a corrupt business, and contractors lay poor-quality roads and skim government funds. If we can empower rural communities to effectively do a quality check on the roads laid in their area, it would really help them. They could then file applications under the Right to Information Act to understand why the road was not constructed to mandated quality requirements.

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