[Book Review] Mastering the Machine Revisited: Poverty, Aid and Technology

Mastering the Machine Revisited: Poverty, Aid and Technology
(by Ian Smillie)

I think this book is one of the few books focusing on technology adoption in international development.
The book provides a comprehensive and thoughtful overview of this matter, well contextualizing technology with the history of aid and forthcoming global issues. Although it was written 20 years ago, the arguments in this book are still scintillating.

The book consists of three parts: Beginning with the history of aid, the first part criticizes the “North” for creating aid projects as the ego of the giver. The second part digs into what we currently know about the success and failure of technology adoption based on sector-wise use cases. The last part provides profound insights for future sustainable development.

“Small is (not always) Beautiful”
This book does not acclaim small-scale NGOs and participatory approaches straightforwardly. While the author severely criticizes the bilateral and multilateral donors’ aid and agrees with small-scale, low-cost, and participatory approaches, the author points out the shortcomings of NGOs and the essential components of “successful” technology transfer and adoption.
Community-driven technology adoption needs supporters who are tolerant of local champions’ failures in the process of attempts to modify the technology into a locally acceptable one. It is also mentioned that without a clear understanding of the capabilities and the intentions of local people’s activities, many projects are unlikely to succeed.

“Sustainable Development”
The book sheds light on “sustainability” from multiple perspectives. The definition includes not only resources sustainability, and financial sustainability commonly argued, but also technical sustainability (development and maintenance of appropriately trained personnel to meet needs at the local level), social sustainability (development and maintenance of community support as well as capacity within the community to play an effective role), political sustainability (development and maintenance of the political will necessary to sustain a major policy direction), and managerial sustainability (development and maintenance of the capacity to direct and plan effective services responding to development needs). Moreover, according to the author, the key factors in sustainability can be clustered around four themes: stakeholder involvement, time and resources, capacity, and the policy environment.

I really enjoyed this book because it is well-thought, balanced, and futuristic. This book can also be a good reference to the early activities of BRAC and Grameen Bank.
My favorite part is the quote the author cited from Neil Postman’s words —

Even with better communication technology, information does not equal knowledge. Neil Postman defines knowledge as “organized information — information that is embedded in some context; information that has a purpose, that leads one to seek further information in order to understand something about the world. When one has knowledge, one knows how to make sense of information.” the problem, he suggests, is not how to move information. “We solved that problem long ago. The problem is how to transform information into knowledge, and how to transform knowledge into wisdom. If we can solve that problem, the rest will take care of itself.”