Technology for the Poor Tarun Khanna
Why are the poor generally underserved by technology? Researching this question had been a principle vocation of mine for the past two decades. A common answer is that new technologies tend to be expensive to bring to fruition, not just because of the research and development that goes into their gestation, but also because they have to subsequently be adapted to and customized for the poor. Since the poor do not have the capacity to compensate entrepreneurs for the cost of resources dedicated to pull this off, their technological needs go unmet. One sees this rich-world neglect of the lower demographics most poignantly in the so-called orphan diseases category, where research on treatment of diseases that disproportionately afflict the poor remains quite scarce. Orphan diseases include some that are rare across the board and don’t discriminate based on affluence of the afflicted, but they also include diseases that primarily still afflict the poor—think malaria and tuberculosis, which are still the scourge of many, as well as sleeping sickness and Chagas disease, for example. Now, some entrepreneurs are addressing such rare and treatable diseases. For example, the Cambridge-based science team founded by Henri Termeer at Genzyme, subsequently part of the French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi-Aventis, has made a viable business out of treating rare diseases. Other organizations, like the Gates Foundation, generously support some research. But the overwhelming fact is that the poor’s diseases are systemically under-addressed, and the neglect is not limited to drugs; surgical capacity is also woefully inadequate in the developing world. This predicament prompts a number of questions. First, how do we get the technology in question to the poor, or the poor to the technology? The access Harvard South Asia Institute 89