Glasses are one key to improving the economic productivity of poor people in developing countries. Photo: deepchi1 (flickr)

Poor vision may not seem like an economic problem at first glance. But according to the World Health Organization, workers with poor and uncorrected vision cost the global economy hundreds of billions of dollars in lost productivity each year.

Many of these workers struggle to put food on the table, much less purchase an expensive pair of glasses, so their vision problems go untreated. This situation may change thanks to an innovative new series of affordable glasses designs that the New York Times recently highlighted. Their genius lies in two factors: their low cost and how easy it is to adjust them. Production is cheaper when a single model can be made to fit almost anyone, which also cuts out the need for expensive doctors to write vision prescriptions.

How can glasses be one-size-fits-all? One type highlighted by The Times has lenses whose refraction can be adjusted by injecting a clear liquid into them, while another has overlapping lenses that can be adjusted by the user. These models are already improving the lives of wearers in countries like Rwanda, Afghanistan, Ghana, and Tanzania and cost $19 and $4, respectively.

Despite their potential, low-cost eyeglasses still face problems. As The New York Times explains, the glasses could cost only $1-2 per pair if produced in great enough volumes, but supply chains don't yet exist to distribute such quantities of glasses to those who need them.

The field of low-cost eyeglass production and distribution is in its infancy, but keep your eyes open for great things to come.

Innovative practices in Indian health care are make surgeries more affordable. Photo: World Bank Photo Collection (flickr)

The numbers alone say a lot: A heart surgery that costs between $20,000 and $40,000 in the United States can cost only $2,000 in India.

The medical tourism industry has always taken advantage of lower health care costs in India and other developing countries. Some, however, are thinking beyond that. The Wall Street Journal recently profiled Dr. Devi Shetty, an Indian physician who has radically rethought the way heart surgery is managed and priced to make it more affordable than ever before.

Quite simply, Dr. Shetty is making heart surgery cheaper by doing more of it, says The Journal. The heart hospital he opened in India has 1,000 beds (the average U.S. hospital has 160 beds), and the sheer number of surgeries it performs gives it a lot of bargaining power for the equipment that it buys — carefully chosen for its cost. His physicians do more surgeries per day and repeat the same procedure more often than American doctors, giving them invaluable experience and expertise. Dr. Shetty plans to expand his private hospital complex significantly in the the next five years — a move that will give him even more leverage over suppliers.

Dr. Shetty's cost-cutting drive was propelled by a desire to make heart surgery affordable for Indians, after he understood the incompatibility of expensive health care and poverty. $2,000 for a life-saving surgery can be prohibitively expensive for some Indians, so many patients pay their medical bills through a special insurance plan developed by Dr. Shetty, in partnership with government officials from the state of Karnataka.

Dr. Shetty suspects that this kind of health care is likely to appeal to Westerners as well. He plans to open another hospital in the Cayman Islands specifically to serve Americans who want to lower their own health bills.

A homemade drip-irrigation system. Photo: Care of Creation (flickr)

Flood irrigation: that's how poor farmers in developing countries usually water their crops. It's wasteful and too water-intensive to work in the dry season, but until recently there haven't been other viable options — a traditional drip irrigation system could cost thousands of dollars.

But social entrepreneurs like Paul Polock and the California-based company, Driptech are working to change this by helping poor farmers set up low-cost drip irrigation systems. Driptech can sell their irrigation system for $30 in places like India, China and Ethiopia, because they use cheaper materials and have developed a new (top-secret) method for punching the holes in the irrigation tubes, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

As Business Week notes, the technology could be transformative:

Experts say low-cost irrigation could alter the economics of food. Subsistence farmers may be able to grow excess crops they can sell. Countries that rely on food imports could see their dependence on outsiders decline.

The innovation has allowed poor farmers to save "water, labor, and time — all while growing a valuable dry-season crop that greatly increased their annual income," boasts Driptech's website.

Driptech plans to relocate their manufacturing facilities to the countries where their products are sold. The company's blog notes that this "will help support the local economies while cutting out transportation costs and headaches."

Selling redesigned products to the poor can be a profitable business model, as some companies in India have also discovered. (I wrote about this phenomenon in "Selling to the Poor, On Terms They Can Afford"). In line with this trend, Driptech expects to make money while helping poor farmers start to turn a profit of their own.

Economist Glenn Hubbard argues that aid targeting local African business development would help the continent more than infrastructure projects like roads. Photo: Stefan Gara (flickr)

Foreign aid has failed to end poverty in Africa because it often funds the wrong kinds of projects, says economist Glenn Hubbard. As he explains in a recent podcast interview with NPR's PlanetMoney, Africa remains just as poor as it was 50 years ago, despite the $1 trillion in foreign aid that developed countries have spent since WWII.

How to fix this? Hubbard argues that funneling aid money directly to local businesses is the most effective way to promote growth and end poverty, an idea he expands on in his book The Aid Trap. He contends in an interview with Columbia University Press that Western governments could model such an initiative on the Marshall Plan, the foreign aid program that the United States used to rebuild Europe after WWII:

Everyone in aid recognizes the Marshall Plan as the most successful aid program in history. What few realize is how the Marshall Plan actually worked. It made loans to Europe’s private businesses, who repaid them to a national fund, which spent the money on commercial infrastructure like ports and roads.

Hubbard believes that this aid model can also be applied to Africa, since small-to-medium sized business are the engines of any economy. "There is a collective amnesia among prosperous countries about how they themselves rose from poverty: their local business sectors," he writes in an article for CNNMoney. By contrast, large multinationals doing business in Africa rarely impact local poverty levels.

"We can do [this plan] without spending new money," Hubbard says to PlanetMoney, explaining that he just wants to restructure how aid is given. He also believes that "we have a moral imperative to act" to end poverty through aid, in contrast to the prominent economist Dambisa Moyo, who argues that Africa would be better off without any aid at all (see Manasi Sharma's "Is Foreign Aid Helping or Hurting Africa?"). Hubbard tells Columbia University Press that not all aid money should go to business either, since humanitarian aid and microfinance programs are both successful and necessary for the poor.

Hubbard admits to the PlanetMoney team that the idea has some risks, such as the possibility that local elites could siphon off many of the benefits without improving the lives of the poor. However, he says that it's even easier for them to do so under the current system. "The traditional aid has definitely strengthened the elites," he explains.

Despite possible drawbacks, as Hubbard points out to PlanetMoney, it's clear that when one aid plan has already failed, we shouldn't try to duplicate it for another sixty years — we should move on to something new. And as he tells Columbia University Press, "It’s not that business hasn’t worked in poor countries, it’s that business never had a chance in poor countries. Let’s provide that chance."

A new, low-cost water filtration system will make it easier for poor Indians to access clean drinking water. Photo: Jackol (flickr)

Here's some conventional marketing wisdom: People who live on less than $2 per day simply aren't a worthwhile target demographic.

But recently, some Indian companies are challenging such ossified thinking with innovative products designed to fit the needs of India's poor, reports The Wall Street Journal:

Such inventions represent a fundamental shift in the global order of innovation. Until recently, the West served rich consumers and then let its products and technology filter down to poorer countries. Now, with the developed world mired in a slump and the developing world still growing quickly, companies are focusing on how to innovate, and profit, by going straight to the bottom rung of the economic ladder.

As the Wall Street Journal explains, Indian companies started to change the way they looked at impoverished consumers after they snapped up low-priced cell phones. Then companies began to design products that they hoped would find a similarly huge demand. Soon, Tata Motors released the Nano car, a small $2000 vehicle that made car ownership a possibility for a whole new slice of Indians since it sold for less than half the price of the next-cheapest car on the Indian market. Tata plans to export a more luxurious version of the Nano to Europe — providing an example of how the goods designed for local markets could increase global competition between Indian and Western companies.

There are several other examples of products redesigned with the poor in mind. Cheap battery-powered refrigerators are a huge help to families without electricity in their homes. The solar-powered cell phone base station won third place in The Wall Street Journal's Technology Innovation Awards earlier this year. And the introduction of mobile banking is revolutionizing banking and money transfers in rural areas via cell phones in many poor countries.

It's a newer way of thinking about poverty, and one driven by bottom-line concerns: How can firms sell the poor what they need now, rather than waiting until they have the money to buy what others already have?

Plasmodium falciparum (malaria) parasite taking over red blood cells. Photo: Eric Fortin (Flickr)

A team of engineers at the University of California at Berkeley are pushing the limits of cell phone technology with the development of their newly minted Cellscope.

The device is a six-inch microscope that attaches to a cell phone’s digital camera lens to take high resolution microscopic images of blood and sputum samples. The Cellscope's compact size and durability makes it ideal for use in the field, nearly eliminating the health worker's need for expensive tabletop microscopes.

The Cellscope team, led by Principal Investigator Dan Fletcher, has been able to reliably identify pathogens from two of the most prominent diseases in the underdeveloped world — malaria and tuberculosis. Combined, the World Health Organization estimates that the two diseases kill 2.7 million people each year, although both are treatable if caught early. (The vast majority of malaria and tuberculosis cases are found in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia respectively.) The Cellscope offers healthcare workers in remote areas a valuable diagnostic tool, aiding in reliable early detection of these two diseases.

Right now the Cellscope is still being tested in the field. But the UC Berkeley team hopes that in time, data captured by the Cellscope will be uploaded to a central database, allowing medical workers to track the spread of diseases more efficiently than ever before.

Have you heard of "appropriate technology?" It's a movement that helps the world’s poorest people with affordable, simple and practical inventions that address every day problems.

Some examples include:

• The Q-Drum, a circular drum that allows women and children to transport water by pulling a rope attached to the jug as it rolls on the ground, instead of carrying it on their heads.
• The Lifestraw, a portable, filtered drinking straw that allows water to be safely sipped from rivers, lakes and ponds.
• The Solar Home Lighting System, which allows children to study at night using solar-powered screens instead of electricity.

"We need to see the poor as customers rather than charity recipients," says Paul Polak, one of the notables in the appropriate technology movement. "We need a revolution in how multinationals design, price and market their products. There is a huge virgin market out there!"

Explore photos and videos of more inventions at Design for the Other 90%, the website for an exhibit currently touring U.S. museums.

This isn't an adult tricycle, it's an innovative way to reduce the number of people — estimated at 1.1 billion — who lack access to clean drinking water.

The Aquaduct is essentially a bicycle that can transport and filter up to 20 gallons of water at a time.

It's simple to use: Just ride to your local water source and pour water into the rear holding tank. As you ride home, the pedaling forces the water through a filtration system and into a smaller holding tank in the front. You can also filter the water by pedaling in place.

Watch the video to see how it all works.

Recognizing the health and pollution concerns associated with traditional wood-burning stoves, researchers from Envirofit are developing a cleaner burning stove that reduces smoke output and uses less firewood. It is estimated that "80 percent of rural households in developing countries cook with solid fuels like wood, coal, crop residues and dung." (World Health Organization)