"In the developing world, 24,000 children under the age of five die every day from preventable causes like diarrhea contracted from unclean water." - UNICEF
That's 54 jumbo jets a day.
I also remain unimpressed by the ambition of his list. And by yours.
That's an important problem. But my list was a list of startup ideas, not important problems generally. I'm not certain the problem of water supplies is best addressed by for profit companies (it might, but I'm not sure), so it doesn't make a good example to put on a list of startup ideas.
That's fair, but I think we, in this community, have a stigma that we work on trivial and superficial problems. There are far too many cat photo sharing sites like Color and not enough efforts like 1 Laptop Per Child. We have to be diligent in clarifying that.
Our goal has to be to make the world a better place, not simply to make a few of us more more money than we can spend.
One of the core problems the world faces going forwards is resource supply - water, food, fuel. It's long been predicted that the next large-scale war will be over water supplies; there are already a number of simmering conflicts that go back to access to water.
Why are we running out of resources? Significantly, because there's too many people for the resources we have.
Why do we have too many people? Explosive population growth over the past 100-150 years, particularly in the last 50. World population has gone up nearly 50% in 25 years.
What's historically been the best way of arresting population growth? War; kill lots of people. Hmm, not really an acceptable plan. What's the next best? Education, in particular female education.
Now, at its core I agree with your point that the list was under-ambitious. Well, let's refine that - only parochially ambitious. So let's go big. We want a sustainable, long-term end to hunger and world peace.
What do we do for that? Give a man to fish - teach a man to fish. Food parcels and free medicine are a sticking plaster - necessary in the short-term, insufficient in the long-term. Fair trade helps but alone is improving their position at the bottom of the supply chain. Get improved education and access to knowledge though and we enable a long-term culture shift that both better equips the presently impoverished for the future and attacks the root causes of the resource instability that currently so impoverish them.
Which is where projects like OLPC and the Indian tablets are so important, and where (if done properly), the startup idea to replace universities is the biggest and most important on the list. Take it all the way and it's not about knocking down Yale and Harvard; it's about world peace and an end to famine.
OLPC has been such a failure because it was designed without understanding or respect for the situation the people live in. I agree with you about medicines etc. being bandages and education being the most important thing. But I think when you veer into "universities" and "cheap computers" that things become sketchy.
Replacing universities doesn't help the developing world, not really, because the education would have to be tailored to them.
If you want to read a book about one of these problems (sanitation) and how aid efforts tend to go totally haywire for the same reasons OLPC does, read The Big Necessity.
The needs are more basic. People require self-sufficiency in the basics before having a tablet computer is going to help.
Agree with you on female education… especially also business education and entrepreneurial loans. In this vein, there is a great charity here: http://www.girleffect.org/question
And there is that Indian entrepreneur who developed affordable sanitary pads for women:
Note that this wasn't a charity effort, but a social entrepreneurship effort. And pads are important. Women are not just uneducated, they are hampered even when healthy.
Finally, many people in developing countries have a cell phone which they can use via SMS to determine market prices for their farmed produce etc., which is already a great boon.
I personally know some folks, who grew up in Africa, who are doing great & interesting things to serve these people where and how they are, not by assuming they need somebody to come in and "revolutionize" them. (Which will inevitably fail.)
The reason replacing univeristies will help the developing world (and why I still argue for cheap computers tailored for the needs of the developing world) is that it makes access to aducation that much easier. Yes they need primary rather than tertiary education, but tertiary's the easier market to start deploying in so use it as a beach-head and work down.
At present, why don't they get education? Is it that they don't want it? Aside from a few communities actively holding back education, by and large they know the benefit and want education. The present model doesn't work for them though; the communities are frequently rural and some distance from the provision of education, the families are operating in the subsistence economy and can't afford to release the children to education.
Technology can help attack this from two fronts. One, it enables distance learning at the time of the student's convenience. Education need not be directly opposed to family responsibilities this way, the two can be more easily dovetailed. Education can also more easily be tailored to individual needs; by removing the need for geographic concentration to provide the required training, more appripriate education can be delivered.
Two, education is a (potentially fundable) need on such a scale as to enable transformational economic change society-wide. So much of the economic disadvantage is down to lack of information and poor access to markets from the impoverished communities. An infrastructure to enable distance learning on a whole-society scale is just as able to provide general community information and revolutionise access to markets. Think eBay's had a tranformational effect on some businesses? Wait until you see what the same thing could do to third-world subsistence farmers.
Transform education through technology-based distance learning. The easiest starting point for that is tertiary education in the west, which shows high demand but poor utilisation of possible technological effects coupled with high costs from the incumbents. Then use that infrastructure to achieve the really transformational change, by educating the third-world poor.
No, they die because they are ignorant of sanitation and therefore don't have any. Have you read anything on the subject, or are you just assuming?
Secondly, there is certainly money to be made in solving the problem, if you're not a truly lazy thinker who bases his conclusions off what he hears in TV news soundbites:
Lastly, I'm sure that TOMS and Warby Parker would be interested to hear that there's no money in helping poor people gain access to shoes or glasses, as well.
My statement was not meant to be factual but rather indicative of a certain cynicism on my part about what I think the motivations behind people starting (the vast majority) of companies are. Sorry that wasn't clear.
"In the developing world, 24,000 children under the age of five die every day from preventable causes like diarrhea contracted from unclean water." - UNICEF
That's 54 jumbo jets a day.
I also remain unimpressed by the ambition of his list. And by yours.