I strongly agree that it's incomparably more important to teach a man/village how to fish/build a bike than to give them one. Unfortunately most people who focus on "helping" are grossly incompetent and have largely misaligned incentives (and oversight).

As for local innovation, it think it very much depends on where. I've visited and lived in many communities in developing nations in Latin America and there's a distinct dearth of not just innovative solutions, but even just basic and seemingly obvious ones. Upon seeing and feeling this 7 years ago, I decided to dedicate my life to it. I'm hopeful that in the coming year I'll finally be ready to share what I've been working on to facilitate it in a more scalable way...

> If you go to villages in developing nations, you'll see these kinds of innovative solutions all over - ...

Years ago I remember reading an article about Russians making a living in the USSR. A man in a town wanted to mow his lawn but could not afford a mower (or maybe he could not easily obtain one?) His solution was a scavenged washing machine motor mounted to an old kids tricycle spinning a home made blade.

World Bicycle Relief has one approach to the transportation angle:

https://worldbicyclerelief.org/mechanics-of-mobility/

One product which I can still remember back from when Banana Republic was still an obscure and cool and independent company with a charming hand-illustrated catalog was pairs of slippers/shoes made in 3rd world countries where the sole was a repurposed worn-out bicycle tire.... Interesting inversion of the usual order of things.

it's very easy to verge into OLPC type thinking with this, you probably should just give them normal bikes instead of trying to come up with some bespoke DIY-able system

> It's one thing to build and ship 1000 bicycles to a poor village, but it's another to teach a village how to make bicycles

Buying and shipping X amount of Y to <country> is easy to calculate the cost. And it's a fixed one time cost. Perfect for PR OP, and humanitarian operation with limited budget and/or available work hours.

Teaching takes the most valuable resources of all: Time. And it's harder to predict how long (and therefor how much $$) it will take before having sustainable results. And it requires on-premise staff and usually to setup some building for the staff, for the teaching grounds, etc.

Tl;DR teaching can easily be 10X the time and money budget of a quick 'send stuff' operation. This is why these are usually big operation handled by big non-profit.

I think this extends to wealthy communities too. Basically every item in my home more complex than a spoon is beyond my capacity to manufacture or repair. A resource that teaches me how to build useful things without relying on a complex supply chain or prohibitively expensive tools would be pretty darn liberating.

> It's one thing to build and ship 1000 bicycles to a poor village, but it's another to teach a village how to make bicycles with random spare pipes and materials they can find anywhere. That way if something breaks, they have the skillset to fix it.

Counterpoint: the bits of a bicycle that are likely to wear out or break are not the pipes that you can find just about anywhere, but difficult-to-make things like chains and bearings.

You know what they say: ship a village 1000 bicycles and they ride for a day. Teach a village to make bicycles and they ride for the rest of their lives.

The counterargument is, of course, "but what's in it for me?"

Making your own bicycle is a waste of time and energy. If you’re buying in bulk from China, you can get a bike for around a $20 per unit cost. I know that $20 is a lot of money in some parts of the world, but it would make far more sense to organize bulk purchases than to try to start up some kind of ersatz low quality bike industry.

Strong disagree. It's much better to get the village a cost-efficient, mass-produced good and then get it on the production program (setup factories/businesses/etc..).

These tools might be useful in war, weird remote situations or maybe when no capital/investors are willing to inject capital in some remote poor african village. But I can't see why any government that can borrow money should do that.

This is of course all wonderful and the ideas presented here might also be useful for Western nations if the war machine starts gaining momentum in, say, a decade or two and things will turn uncomfortable.

That said, I'm also disgusted by the fact this is necessary at all. We designed and/or let an inherently unfair game go on unimpeded and give the losers some scraps so they may survive and continue to play along with can only be called the naturally occurring and less entertaining variant of The Hunger Games.

Any changes to the status quo will have to contend with powerful questions because why build bonds with people you distrust? Why bother including insignificant nations in your decision process? Why not be top dog and trample everyone under your righteous boots? Why not exploit and generally harvest the shit out of everything in sight and retrieve resources for the absolute minimum you can get away with? These sound annoying and they are, but they are really tough questions and they demand a good answer. Just "be a good person" is not cutting it. We need systemic solutions.

In case you're wondering I have the answer: sadly I do not, but I am convinced a couple of you do so please enlighten me.

What would be nice is setting up as much manufacturing as possible in Africa for making bikes designed for Africa.

Bike maintenance isn't a skill issue. It's an issue of specialised tools and hard to get spares. Talk to your own Grand parents. If they weren't rich they'd have had to fix their own bike, and they wouldn't have had Google helping them.