Quote Originally Posted by goesh View Post
I always liked the Peace Corps concept of income generating projects - small, village type projects to boost a bit the standard of living with no dollar amounts ever set in stone, no paper trail, no real government involvement except for a bit of seed money here and there, no real expectations except perhaps a bit of success here and there, nobody to blame for failure but themselves, nobody to take any money they made.
Having been a Peace Corps volunteer and having observed many at close range, I have to comment that while the concept may be lovely, the reality generally falls far short. Volunteers are often very young and have little practical experience; by the time they get half a clue they are generally gone. The practice of bringing in recent graduates with little or no field experience doesn't help: I'd gladly trade one real live farmer for a dozen recent graduates of agricultural schools.

Many volunteers have life-changing experience. Very few leave any tangible difference in their host communities.

The idea of small projects is wonderful, but the real-world challenges of tailoring projects to community needs and avoiding often-hidden constraints are extremely difficult to overcome. Very often projects that are alleged to be community-driven are in fact donor-driven (NGOs push the projects they can sell to their funders). Every once in a while you get a gem, sometimes you see a few that work... most come and go like the tide on the beach.

There's a place for large projects and a place for small ones... but in both fields the return on investment is frighteningly small. In many cases both small and large projects fail because they fail to acknowledge constraints on development imposed by local political and security conditions.

Quote Originally Posted by goesh View Post
In the real bush country of the world, the only way to ever get economies boosted is to infuse them with solar cooking devices, thus freeing up immense amounts of time that can be devoted to more gardening, more crafts and goods and animal production, farming, etc. We've got a big hunk of the bush population, the women, spending maybe 1/4th of their time scrounging wood, hanging around fires cooking and minding the damn pots and pans.
I once listened to a bright-eyed volunteer give an enormously enthusiastic presentation on solar cookers to a group of women, who politely nodded and professed keen interest. After he left the consensus opinion emerged: there's no way we're going to cook standing in the sun, it's too hot. We want to cook in the coolest, shadiest place we can find, just like we always have.

It sounds like you're assuming that the key limiting factor on productivity in "the bush country" is time. In many places I think you'd find that assumption to be invalid. I also think you'd find that those women "hanging around the fires" may be performing other less visible functions as well, notably keeping half an eye on an array of children, including those whose parents are out in the fields being productive.

I'm not saying that solar cookers are useless... in many places they are very useful indeed. In other places they may just gather dust or be diverted to other original purposes (the day after the family planning roadshow comes to town every kid in the village is playing with balloons made from inflated condoms). In order to know the difference somebody has to spend a long time in that village, win the trust of its people, and get a real sense for the needs and the constraints... and there aren't that many people who have the time or the will to do that.