HELPING PEOPLE HELP THEMSELVES

ERIK HERSMAN STANDS OUT IN THE CROWDS near his home in Nairobi, Kenya. It helps that he’s tall and pale, with a bushy beard and an imposing build. But unlike most people in his hometown, he holds a business degree from an American university and a zeal for promoting Africa’s innate inventiveness.

I met this unlikely traveler over dinner a couple of months ago as he was showing off some of the local technologies that inspire him. By the high-tech standards we are most comfortable with today, these Kenyan handiworks, like a handmade welding machine and other artifacts built from scraps of metal and other materials, appear crude. But these objects, and others far more sophisticated, are being created every day in countries across the African continent and in other third- and fourth-world economies. They are byproducts of local ingenuity from entrepreneurs trying to stay above the base of the world’s economic pyramid (see Editorial, September 2009) while at the same time trying to make life for their neighbors easier and safer.

Hersman is a spokesman of sorts for these entrepreneurs. He’s a strong advocate for local inventors and a leading force in helping to bring Western engineering know-how to his adopted homeland.

Raised by missionary parents in Africa, Hersman spent his childhood traveling between Sudan and Kenya. He’s equally comfortable in the U.S., where he was born and lives occasionally, and in Africa, where he lives most of the time. Back in 2008, Hersman and a few African bloggers and technologists created Ushahidi—which means “testimony” in Swahili—a Web site that mapped reported incidents of violence during the post-election crisis in Kenya. The site (www.ushahidi.com) has grown into an open-source engine intended for gathering crisis information from individual witnesses and visualizing data on various problems across the world.

But it is his two blogs, www.AfriGadget.com and www.WhiteAfrican.com, that are most relevant to this column, as they speak to the creative and developmental ingenuity most familiar to all engineers, especially mechanical ones.

As you’ve read before in this column—and in recent messages from ASME Executive Director Thomas G. Loughlin—ASME is fully engaged in helping find solutions to problems affecting all of humankind. Hersman’s work illustrates what can be achieved by smart, passionate individuals driven to make a difference in the lives of others.

The work of engineers often goes unnoticed by the general public, but engineers make a radical impact in the way people live every day. ASME is now spearheading a significant effort aimed at improving the lives of those living at the Base of the Pyramid. I invite you to go online and visit www.EngineeringForChange.org for details of what the Society is doing to connect problem areas with problem solvers.

Next month, I’ll bring you details from those working on the initiative.

—John G. Falcioni, Editor-in-Chief
He can be reached by e-mail at falcionij@asme.org