What Is Appropriate Technology?

Appropriate Technology is an indispensable component of Swadeshi, or localized economics.  In its broadest definition Appropriate Technology is used nowadays to indicate a wide range of technologies that can be used in non-industrialized countries, where access to a traditional power grid is greatly reduced.  As such, it might include products of sophisticated industrial process such as photovoltaic cells, high-tech windmills, solar-powered fence chargers, etc.

A few of items similar to these might find their place in WVI's project in the Ruzizi Valley.  However, the goal will be to limit the role of such technologies in the project.  However, that does not mean that people will be limited to a medieval life-style.  On the contrary, modern engineering of many simple machines has produced the ability to substantially raise the level of productivity and standard of living of people in Third World countries. Thus, Working Villages follows a more traditional definition of Appropriate Technology which includes the following principles:

Criteria for Appropriate Technology

In general, Appropriate Technologies

1.  Must increase the productivity of the worker.
2.  Must not replace the worker.
3.  The worker must have complete control of the technology.
4   Must produce goods and services needed by the worker. (For example: not luxury yachts or battleships or nuclear bombs.) 

In general, Appropriate Technologies

1. Require only small amounts of capital; are cheap enough so that they are accessible to virtually everyone.

2. Emphasize the use of locally available materials, in order to lower costs and reduce supply problems;

3. Are relatively labor-intensive but more productive than many traditional technologies;

4. Are small enough in scale to be affordable to individual families or small groups of families;

5. Can be understood, controlled and maintained by villagers whenever possible, without a high level of specific training;

6. Can be produced in villages or small workshops;

7. Suppose that people can and will work together to bring improvements to communities;

8. Offer opportunities for local people to become involved in the modification and innovation process;

9. Are flexible, can be adapted to different places and changing circumstances;

10. Can be used in productive ways without doing harm to the environment.

11. Are suitable for small-scale application.

12. Are compatible with a human being's need for creativity.

Some of the reasoning that underlies the concept of appropriate technology may be summarized as follows:

1. It permits local needs to be met more effectively because local people are involved in identifying and working to address these needs; for the same reasons, it is likely to be in harmony with local traditions and values;

2. It means the development of tools that extend human labor and skills, rather than machines that replace human labor and eliminate human skills;

3. It represents a comprehensible and controllable scale of activities, organization and mistakes, at which people without management training can work together and understand what they are doing;

4. It allows more economical operation by minimizing the transport of goods in an era of expensive energy, allowing greater interaction of local industry and permitting greater use of local resources-both human and material;

5. It makes unnecessary many expensive or unavailable finance, transportation, education, advertising, management, and energy services; avoids the loss of local control that use of such outside services implies;

6. It helps to establish a self-sustaining and expanding reservoir of skills in the community which begins from already existing skills;

7. It provides a region with a cushion against the effects of outside economic changes (e.g., the collapse of the world sugar market or the sudden unavailability of fertilizer);

8. It helps to reduce economic, social, and political dependency between individuals, between regions, and between nations, by recognizing that people can and will do things for themselves if they can find a way.

Principles for Appropriate Technology Workplaces

1.  Workplaces have to be created in the areas where the people are living now, and not primarily in metropolitan areas into which they tend to migrate.

2.  Workplaces must be, on average, cheap enough so that they can be created in large numbers without this calling for an unattainable level of capital formation and imports.

3.  Production methods employed must be relatively simple, so that the demands for high skills are minimized, not only in the production process itself, but also in matters of organisation, raw material supply, financing, marketing, and so forth.

4.  Production should be mainly from local materials and mainly for local use.

(from: Appropriate Technology Sourcebook by Ken Darrow and Mike Saxenian;  Small Is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher; Essays in Gandhian Economics, edited by Romesh Diwan and Mark Lutz)