TED Blog | Fellows Friday with Peter Haas

You studied philosophy and psychology in school. How did you gain expertise in confined masonry, engineering, and business?

In my TED talk I discussed confined masonry, but I’m not an expert on it. I’m not an expert on engineering or business, either. What we do at AIDG is bring in other people who have expertise, and rely on them to do the trainings. What I think I’m able to do is see clearly what the deficiencies in a region are. I have an eye for what are good businesses to try to support, and what will fail.

I spent a year traveling around the world, volunteering for different NGOs. Because of my previous work on a horse ranch organic farm, I was able to repair things that people in the villages I traveled to weren’t sure how to repair. I realized, through that experience, that the typical NGO model really doesn’t work for giving village-scale infrastructure. There’s no economic incentive to preserve upkeep knowledge. People who have the knowledge of how to repair things generally get better jobs and move away. And people don’t treat the donation of an infrastructure project the same way they treat infrastructure that they’ve had to save up for and buy.

It got me wondering, “How do you institutionalize the knowledge of how to repair things?” And, “How do you make sure these projects that are done out in villages actually succeed?”

In the US or Europe, small businesses often do infrastructure repair work. I realized developing countries needed small businesses like that to do the same type of work. But there is a comparative lack of small businesses doing infrastructure work in developing economies. And there are a lot of barriers for early-stage entrepreneurs that don’t exist in the developed world.

via blog.ted.com