[gertrunde]

I knew a charity group many years ago that targeted this issue.

They noticed that aid charities would give modern motorcycles to rural medical workers that rapidly ended up in a non-working state.

So they gathered older motorbikes, more suitable and more repairable in the destination country, and spent time training the end users in maintenance and upkeep, and ongoing support.

[kulahan]

Not an uncommon problem with charities working with foreign nations. They fail to capture the local populations because they think of these problems in a vacuum.

Person lacks reliable transportation -> give them some -> problem solved

There's another example - a charity provides treated mosquito nets for free to millions of families in Africa. Great!

People lack reliable mosquito protection -> give them treated nets -> problem solved!

But in reality it went like this:

People lack reliable mosquito protection -> give them treated nets -> many of these families are starving -> fine mesh nets are great at catching small fish -> all their food is now infected with insecticide, mosquitos continue to access the family as well

[fwipsy]

Givewell did an analysis and concluded that while this is a problem, it's not nearly enough to offset the benefit which comes from using the nets for their intended purpose: https://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/in...

Certainly improving public health in developing countries is a hard problem! But it's not impossible and existing efforts have had an effect.

[yabones]

That was exactly the goal with the Buffalo Bicycle project, and I'd say it worked pretty well. Make a bike that's mechanically simple & reliable, maintainable with common tools, and train technicians to fix and upkeep them. Basically create the Toyota Landcruiser of bikes. I kind of want one, even though it's a "bad" bike by the standards of most western audiences (heavy, slow, ugly, etc)

https://buffaloride.org/buffalobicycle https://worldbicyclerelief.org/product-development/