"Smart Infrastructure"

When talking about Haiti we often hear about the lack of infrastructure the country had even before the earthquake. A growing movement of poverty-fighters are working with villages in the underdeveloped world to bring them infrastructure solutions.

The charities and entrepreneurs who do this "smart infrastructure" work use science and innovation to provide such things as toilets that covert waste into bio-fuel, even earthquake resistant buildings.

From the New York Times, Henry Fountain profiles a charity that has changed plans to provide medical care since the earthquake.

A week ago, Elizabeth Sheehan, the founder of Containers to Clinics, a nonprofit organization in Dover, Mass., was preparing to deploy the group’s first medical clinic overseas. Made from two shipping containers, it was to be sent to the Dominican Republic, where it would begin to fulfill the group’s long-term goal of building health care infrastructure in developing countries through networks of small container clinics in rural areas.

Then, last Tuesday, a magnitude 7 earthquake struck the Dominican Republic’s neighbor, Haiti. Hospitals in the capital, Port-au-Prince, were destroyed or damaged, and basic medical care was practically nonexistent. Ms. Sheehan said her donors immediately started calling her. “They all said, ‘Why don’t you send it there?’ ” she said.

Now, the group may dispatch the clinic, which has two examining rooms, a laboratory and a pharmacy, to Port-au-Prince if a medical team and supplies can be arranged.

“It can be used in this disaster situation,” Ms. Sheehan said, and then left in Haiti or sent on to Bani, on the Dominican Republic’s south coast, to fulfill the original mission. “We are committed to long-term primary health care for women and children.”

Containers to Clinics is one of many innovative approaches to building or rebuilding infrastructure in developing countries, to help forestall disasters or, as in Haiti, recover from one. Among them are new ideas and projects to supply quality housing, clean water, proper waste treatment and affordable energy, in addition to health care.

Their promoters share a belief that while the conventional top-down approach, by governments and large relief agencies coming in with large projects, works for initial relief and recovery, long-term reconstruction — “building back better,” in the parlance of redevelopment specialists — requires more involvement of local people.