Assistant Professor Evan Thomas, director of Portland State University's SWEET lab, demonstrates the way that the lab measures the output of two different low-fuel stoves. Photo: Megan McMorran/Mercy Corps

Brilliant ideas don’t always pan out. In the realm of humanitarian development, innovations that fall flat affect more than just investors’ bank accounts.

That's why a small team at an Oregon university has set out to become the testing ground for the world's possibly brilliant humanitarian inventions. This post is the first of a Global Envision series on how they're doing it.

While promising products like self-adjusting eyeglasses or low-fuel stoves generally undergo some sort of lab testing prior to introduction, they often perform differently than expected once they’ve reached their destination due to environmental or cultural differences. Rather than waiting to see results after the fact, Portland State University is working on a grand plan to evaluate magic bullets like these before they hit the developing world.

It's a mission that straddles two separately funded PSU programs. The internationally focused Sustainable Water, Energy, and Environmental Technologies Lab shares a roof with the domestically focused Green Building Research Lab. The latter is stocked with equipment that, as PSU architecture professor Sergio Palleroni put it, "can create any environment on earth, any weather condition." PSU researchers can use the equipment to closely mimic the environmental conditions of the destination country and closely measure products’ performance in all sorts of climatic conditions.

The SWEET lab, meanwhile, focuses specifically on putting low-cost sustainability products through a battery of tests.

"We want to become the Consumer Reports for the developing world," said Palleroni, standing in a lab room devoted to the subject. That means not only ensuring that products function as they should, but also measuring how well they function — and how similar products stack up against one another. Two small, low-fuel, low-emission stoves burned side-by-side when we visited, various sensors measuring their ouput and rate of fuel consumption.

In forthcoming posts in this series, we’ll be exploring a few of the PSU labs’ projects. Stay tuned.

Margo Conner is a senior at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, majoring in international affairs. Read her other contributions to Global Envision.

View of the Samtskhe-Javakheti Region. Photo: Justin Cruanes

My cab driver was yelling something that sounded like "khows, khows!" I hadn't the faintest idea what he was talking about until I saw the spotted figures in the distance and realized he was saying "cows."

I had asked the driver what people in the area do for a living. "Livestock agriculture," he said. We chatted a bit in what little words we had in common as I made my way to visit some Mercy Corps programs in the Samtskhe-Javakheti Region.

Sapara Monastery. Photo: Justin Cruanes

In Georgia, cows are something worth shouting about. Particularly in the Samtskhe-Javakheti Region, where agriculture is the main economic activity. However, 67 percent of the population lives in poverty and farmers struggle due to ethnic discrimination, small production capabilities, low quality goods and an inability to participate in market activities. Having 20 cows on hand makes little difference when you have no place to properly refrigerate the milk they produce. Furthermore, if farmers can’t store milk, they can’t age cheese, and fresh cheese is of much lower value than if let to age a bit.

The Mercy Corps programs train community leaders and small-scale livestock producers in improving business practices, animal care, food safety, hygiene and budgeting. Instead of supplying farmers with short-term solutions (such as handing them cattle and equipment), the projects are working to permanently improve weaker parts of the production chain — greasing the production chain without becoming a part of it. The programs are doing this through several means: improving accessibility and transport of goods, increasing the transparency of the market and creating an environment where these measures can eventually sustain themselves.

Sapara Barn. Photo: Justin Cruanes

My first order of business was to check out the Sapara Monastery, where the Mercy Corps is working with local community leaders to improve the capacity of the monks' barn. At the moment, the barn can only hold about five to seven cattle. The program is helping to double their barn’s capacity, enough to accommodate 12 to 14 cattle.

Most of the milk produced in the region is used to make cheese, but the farmers have been without a means to store it. Instead, they sell directly to the market for a low price. Mercy Corps has helped renovate a former Soviet cheese storage facility for local use. This new facility lets farmers allow their cheese to mature so it can be sold later for increased profits.

Tractor shop. Photo: Justin Cruanes

Afterwards, we made our way to the town’s tractor supplier, where the program has set up links between farmers and the shop. We arrived just in time to witness the purchase of a tractor by a local farmer. The program supplies farmers with about 30 percent of the funds needed to purchase tractors.

Eventually we made our way to the office, where Mercy Corps Program Director for Georgia, Davidson Highfill, highlighted the program's work to improve "market visibility" by feeding databases of price statistics to farmers.

The Mercy Corps programs in the Samtskhe-Javakheti Region are working from several different angles to improve the livelihood of many small-scale farmers. From the construction of milk storage facilities to access to important market information, these programs are supplying the means for long term improvements for the farming community and it's "khows."

What do you get when you combine 120,000 data points measuring 200 years of income and life expectancy data for 200 countries with the creative genius of global health expert Hans Rosling? This. Watch.

World Development Indicators 2010 Launch and Open Data Initiative announced April 10, 2010. Photo: Simone D. McCourtie/World Bank (Flickr).

Problems cannot be solved without understanding the facts. Because of this, the World Bank launched a collaborative open data website to promote transparency and informed policy-making in April. The website allows users to download, manipulate, and use data freely. And it is available in several languages.

Pooling all this data in one place is helpful because it allows users to compare things like foreign aid dollars and fluctuations in the poverty rate within a country over a set time period. Or correlations between key health indicators and stats on education, and so on. With these tools development practitioners should be able to learn what is most statistically important to reverse poverty.

World Bank President Robert B. Zoellick discussed the importance of public data access shortly after the unveiling:

Statistics tell the story of people in developing and emerging countries and can play an important part in helping to overcome poverty. They are now easily accessible on the Web for all users, and can be used to create new apps for development.

Later this year, the organization will announce its "Apps for Development Competition," challenging users like you to make new mash-ups and tools for development. Keep an eye out for the announcement!

This Gapminder chart graphs the number of children per woman against the percentage of the population with access to clean water.

Have you ever wondered if the quality of a child's teeth is related to the GDP per capita of his or her country?

Thanks to a Swedish website called Gapminder, you now have the chance to find out — and to discover stranger correlations yet. The site gives users the chance to create graphs of everything from fertility to the number of broadband Internet subscribers in a given country. That way, they can explore the ways that these indicators may or may not be connected. The resulting charts make dealing with statistics not only easier than usual, but also a little bit addictive and fun.

Aside from the fun factor, the site is meant to be a serious tool: It aims to support the UN Millennium Development Goals by making relevant statistics more accessible, with data sets drawn from international organizations and corporations ranging from UNESCO to the British oil company BP.

I'm interested in women's issues, for example, and Gapminder makes it enjoyable for me to get an idea of how the average age of a woman when she first marries correlates with the life expectancy in her country. Watching the dots fly across to the screen in a good approximation of a slanted line tells me that the two factors do, in fact, correlate very well. Of course, the golden rule of statistics — that correlation doesn't equal causation — still applies, so I don't know if one of these factors actually caused the other. Did women get married later because they were living longer, or did getting married later contribute to population longevity when fewer women died young in childbirth, for example? Or — as seems more likely — does a population live longer and get married later because it's getting wealthier or more educated? My graph is sworn to silence on such questions, but Gapminder does make it easy for me to investigate further with a new chart and a different measurement, like GDP or education levels.

There are more caveats, too. Data isn't available for all years on all topics in all countries, partly because the data sets come from such disparate organizations and partly because these organizations weren't always around to do the counting. If you want to know how GDP per capita correlated with infant mortality in the early 1800s, you'll only have two countries to compare — Sweden and Austria. And any data set is only as good as the government or organization that collects it: a notice on the website points out that their population numbers for the U.S. before 1900 include neither African Americans nor Native Americans.

By providing open access to a tool that makes analyzing statistics easier, Gapminder is helping make such data more democratic, more transparent, and, perhaps, a little more honest.