Development Engineering: Empowering the Poor through Sustainable Technology-based Solutions
This book details the development and evaluation of technological interventions designed to improve human and economic development within complex, low-resource settings, showing that a solution becomes an innovation when it reaches widespread use. The book shortens the time-gap between development and up-take of the intervention, especially for student solution-developers or innovators who are new to the cultural and geopolitical settings of the problem-source country or region. Technological interventions in development are sustainable if they meet a real need, are affordable by the users, fit within the cultural context and are ergonomically appropriate. Many interventions have failed because of inattentiveness to one or more of these factors. Each of the book’s points is backed up with scholarly research work, confidently guiding solution-developers confronted with issues such as acquiring intellectual property protections, among many others.
William S. Kisaalita obtained his PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of British Columbia. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Engineering at the University of Georgia. One of his areas of teaching and research interests is development engineering. His work has resulted in the commercialization of several products, enabling smallholder farmers to achieve order of magnitude increase in productivity or reduced labour. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Uganda National Academy of Sciences, and a Fulbright Scholar.
“This is impressive! William Kisaalita draws from the rich African story telling traditions and makes complicated concepts accessible, no matter what the reader’s background is. Readers will feel like they are in his field class, with all the sights and sounds. Reading the book and putting the lessons in practice will drastically reduce the time to the reader’s development-related destination.”
Dr Salibo Somé
Founder and Executive Director, Africa Sustainable Development Council, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso
“A long overdue book and an excellent guide and light of best practices for developing technologies for smallholder farmers. The author’s scholarly observations from over two decades of successful innovations in sub-Saharan Africa is a premier of Development Engineering.”
Professor Gajendra Singh
Foreign Fellow, National Academy of Agricultural Sciences (India); Vice-President of Academic Affairs Emeritus (Thailand); Full Member of the Club of Bologna
“A refreshing and incisive portrayal of the challenges of developing and deploying interventions in low-resource settings, such as sub-Saharan Africa. Development Engineering equips you with simple but powerful ways to triumph over these challenges.”
K.C. Das, PhD, PE,
Georgia Athletic Association Professor, University of Georgia; Jefferson Science Fellow (2019-20), Senior Science Advisor, USAID
Buy This Book
