Twelve
Social and Economic Problems Calling for the Development of Intermediate Technology
INTRODUCTION
In many places in the world today the poor are getting poorer while the rich are getting richer, and the established processes of foreign aid and development planning appear to be unable to overcome this tendency. In fact, they often seem to promote it, for it is always easier to help those who can help themselves than to help the helpless. Nearly all the socalled developing countries have a modern sector where the patterns of living and working are similar to those of the developed countries, but they also have a non-modern sector, accounting for the vast majority of the total population, where the patterns of living and working are not only profoundly unsatisfactory but also in a process of accelerating decay.
I am concerned here exclusively with the problem of helping the people in the non-modern sector. This does not imply the suggestion that constructive work in the modern sector should be discontinued, and there can be no doubt that it will continue in any case. But it does imply the conviction that all successes in the modern sector are likely to be illusory unless there is also a healthy growth - or at least a healthy condition of stability - among the very great numbers of people today whose life is characterised not only by dire poverty but also by hopelessness,
THE NEED FOR INTERMEDIATE TECHNOLOGY
The Condition of the Poor
What is the typical condition of the poor in most of the so-called developing countries? Their work opportunities are so restricted that they cannot work their way out of misery. They are underemployed or totally unemployed, and when they do find occasional work their productivity is exceedingly low. Some of them have land, but often too little. Many have no land and no prospect of ever getting any. They are underemployed or totally unemployed, and then drift into the big cities. But there is no work for them in the big cities either and, of course, no housing. All the same, they flock into the cities because the chances of finding some work appear to be greater there than in the villages where they are nil.
The open and disguised unemployment in the rural areas is often thought to be due entirely to population growth, andv no doubt this is an important contributory factor. But those who hold this view still have to explain why additional people cannot do additional work. It is said that they cannot work because they lack 'capital'. But what is 'capital'? It is the product of human work. The lack of capital can explain a low level of productivity, but it cannot explain a lack of work opportunities. The fact remains, however, that great numbers of people do not work or work only intermittently, and that they are therefore poor and helpless and often desperate enough to leave the village to search for some kind of existence in the big city. Rural unemployment produces mass-migration into cities, leading to a rate of urban growth which would tax the resources of even the richest societies. Rural unemployment becomes urban unemployment.
# Help to Those who Need it Most
The problem may therefore be stated quite simply thus: what can be done to bring health to economic life outside the big cities, in the small towns and villages which still contain - in most cases - eighty to ninety per cent of the total population? As long as the development effort is concentrated mainly on the big cities, where it is easiest to establish new industries, to staff them with managers and men, and to find finance and markets to keep them going, the competition from these industries will further disrupt and destroy non-agricultural production in the rest of the country, will cause additional unemployment outside, and will further accelerate the migration of destitute people into towns that cannot absorb them. The process of mutual poisoning' will not be halted.
It is necessary, therefore, that at least an important part of the development effort should by-pass big cities and be directly concerned with the creation of an agro-industrial structure' in the rural and smalltown areas. In this connection it is necessary to emphasise that the primary need is workplaces, literally millions of workplaces. No-one, of course, would suggest that output-per- man is unimportant but the primary consideration cannot be to maximise output per man, it must be to maximise work opportunities for the unemployed and underemployed For a poor man the chance to work is the greatest of all needs, and even poorly paid and relatively unproductive work is better than idleness. 'Coverage must come before perfection', to use the words of Mr Gabriel Ardant.'
'It is important that there should be enough work for all because that is the only way to eliminate anti-productive reflexes and create a new state of mind - that of a country where labour has become precious and must be put to the best possible use.
In other words, the economic calculus which measures success in terms of output or income, without consideration of the number of jobs, is quite inappropriate in the conditions here under consideration, for it implies a static approach to the problem of development. The dynamic approach pays heed to the needs and reactions of people: their first need is to start work of some kind that brings some reward, however small; it is only when they experience that their time and labour is of value that they can become interested in making it more valuable. It is therefore more important that everybody should produce something than that a few people should each produce a great deal, and this remains true even if in some exceptional cases the total output under the former arrangement should be smaller than it would be under the latter arrangement It will not remain smaller, because this is a dynamic situation capable of generating growth.
An unemployed man is a desperate man and he is practically forced into migration. This is another justification for the assertion that the provision of work opportunities is the primary need and should be the primary objective of economic planning. Without it, the drift of people into the large cities cannot be mitigated, let alone halted.
# The Nature of the Task
The task, then, is to bring into existence millions of new workplaces in the rural areas and small towns. That modern industry, as it has arisen in the developed countries, cannot possibly fulfil this task should be perfectly obvious. It has arisen in societies which are rich in capital and short of labour and therefore cannot possibly be appropriate for societies short of capital and rich in labour. Puerto Rico furnishes a good illustration of the point, To quote from a recent study: 'Development of modern factory-style manufacturing makes only a limited contribution to employment. The Puerto Rican development programme has been unusually vigorous and successful; but from 195262 the average increase of employment in EDA-sponsored plants was about 5,000 a year. With present labour force participation rates, and in the absence of net emigration to the mainland, annual additions to the Puerto Rican labour force would be of the order of 40,000 ... 'Within manufacturing, there should be imaginative exploration of smallscale, more decentralised, more labour-using forms of organisation such as have persisted in the Japanese economy to the present day and have contributed materially to its vigorous growth. Equally powerful illustrations could be drawn from many other countries, notably India and Turkey, where highly ambitious five- year plans regularly show a greater volume of unemployment at the end of the five-year period that at the beginning, even assuming that the plan is fully implemented.
The real task may be formulated in four propositions: First, that workplaces have to be created in the areas where the people are living now, and not primarily in metropolitan areas into which they tend to migrate.
Second, that these workplaces must be, on average, cheap enough so that they can be created in large numbers without this calling for an unattainable level of capital formation and imports. Third, that the production methods employed must be relatively simple, so that the demands for high skills are minimised, not only in the production process itself but also in matters of organisation, raw material supply, financing, marketing, and so forth.
Fourth, that production should be mainly from local materials and mainly for local use. These four requirements-can be met only if there is a 'regional' approach to development and, second, if there is a conscious effort to develop and apply what might be called an 'intermediate technology'. These two conditions will now be considered in turn.
# The Regional or District Approach
A given political unit is not necessarily of the right size for economic development to benefit those whose need is the greatest. In some cases it may be too small, but in the generality of cases today it is too large. Take, for example, the case of India. It is a very large political unit, and it is no doubt desirable from many points of view that this unity should be maintained. But if development policy is concerned merely - or primarily -with 'India-as-a- whole', the natural drift of things will concentratedevelopment mainly in a few metropolitan areas, in the modern sector. Vast areas within the country, containing eighty per cent of the population or more, will benefit little and may indeed suffer. Hence the twin evils of mass unemployment and mass migration into the metropolitan areas. The result of 'development' is that a fortunate minority have their fortunes greatly increased, while those who really need help are left more helpless than ever before. If the purpose of development is to bring help to those who need it most, each 'region' or 'district' within the country needs its own development. This is what is meant by a 'regional' approach.
A further illustration may be drawn from Italy, a relatively wealthy country. Southern Italy and Sicily do not develop merely as a result of successful economic growth in 'Italy-as-a-whole'. Italian industry is concentrated mainly in the north of the country, and its rapid growth does not diminish but on the contrary tends to intensify, the problem of the south. Nothing succeeds like success and, equally, nothing fails like failure. Competition from the north destroys production in the south and drains all talented and enterprising men out of it. Conscious efforts have to be made to counteract these tendencies, for if the population of any region within a country is by-passed by development it becomes actually worse off than before, is thrown into mass unemployment, and forced into mass migration. The evidence of this truth can be found all over the world, even in the most highly developed countries.
In this matter it is not possible to give hard and fast definitions. Much depends on geography and local circumstances. A few thousand people, no doubt, would be too few to constitute a 'district' for economic development; but a few hundred thousand people, even if fairly widely scattered, may well deserve to be treated as such. The whole of Switzerland has less than six million inhabitants: yet it is divided into more than twenty 'cantons', each of which is a kind of development district, with the result that there is a fairly even spread of population and of industry and no tendency towards the formation of excessive concentrations.
Each 'district', ideally speaking, would have some sort of inner cohesion and identity and possess at least one town to serve as a district centre. There is need for a 'cultural structure' just as there is need for an '.economic structure'; thus, while every village would have a primary school, there would be a few small market towns with secondary schools, and the district centre would be big enough to carry an institution of higher learning. The bigger the country, the greater is the need for internal 'structure' and for a decentralised approach to development. If this need is neglected, there is no hope for the poor.
# The Need for an Appropriate Technology
It is obvious that this 'regional' or 'district' approach has no chance of success unless it is based on the employment of a suit- able technology. The establishment of each workplace in modern industry costs a great deal of capital - something of the order of, say, Pounds 2,000 on average. A poor country, naturally, can never afford to establish more than a very limited number of such work- places within any given period of time. A 'modern' workplace, moreover, can be really productive only within a modern environment, and for this reason alone is unlikely to ~t into a 'district' consisting of rural areas and a few snail towns. In every 'developing country' one can find industrial estates set up in rural areas, where high-grade modern equipment is standing idle most of the time because of a lack of organisation finance, raw material sup- plies, transport, marketing facilities, and the like. There are then complaints and recriminations: but they do not alter the fact that a lot of scarce capital resources - normally imports paid from scarce foreign exchange are virtually wasted. The distinction between 'capital-intensive' and 'labour-intensive' industries is, of course, a familiar one in development theory. Although it has an undoubted validity, it does not really make contact with the essence of the problem; for it normally induces people to accept the technology of any given line of production as given and unalterable. If it is then argued that developing countries should give preference to 'labour-intensive' rather than 'capital-intensive' industries, no intelligent action can follow, be cause the choice of industry, in practice, will be determined by quite other, much more powerful criteria, such as raw material base, markets, entrepreneurial interest, etc. The choice of industry is one thing; but the choice of technology to be employed after the choice of industry has been made, is quite another. It is therefore better to speak directly of technology, and not cloud the discussion by choosing terms like 'capital intensity' or 'labour intensity' as one's point of departure. Much the same applies to another distinction frequently made in these discussions, that between 'large-scale' and 'small-scale' industry. It is true that modern industry is often organised in very large units. but 'large- scale' is by no means one of its essential and universal features. Whether a given industrial activity is appropriate to the conditions of a developing district does not directly depend on 'scale', but on the technology employed. A small-scale enterprise with an average cost per workplace of Pounds 2,000 is just as inappropriate as a large-scale enterprise with equally costly workplaces. I believe, therefore, that the best way to make contact with the essential problem is by speaking of technology: economic development in poverty stricken areas can be fruitful only on the basis of what I have called 'intermediate technology'. In the end, intermediate technology will be 'labour-intensive' and will lend itself to use in small-scale establishments. But neither 'labour- intensity' nor 'small-scale' implies 'intermediate technology',
# Definition of Intermediate Technology
If we define the level of technology in terms of 'equipment cost per workplace', we can call the indigenous technology of a typical developing country - symbolically speaking - a Pounds l -technology, while that of the developed countries could be called a Pounds 1,000- technology. The gap between these two technologies is so enormous that a transition from the one to the other is simply impossible. In fact, the current attempt of the developing countries to infiltrate the Pounds 1,000technoIogy into their economies inevitably kills off the Pounds ltechnology at an alarming rate, destroying traditional workplaces much faster than modern workplaces can be created, and thus leaves the poor in a more desperate and helpless position than ever before. If effective help is to be brought to those who need it most, a technology is required which would range in some intermediate position between the Pounds 1-technology and the Pounds 1,000-technology. Let us call it - again symbolically speaking - a Pounds 100-technology,
Such an intermediate technology would be immensely more productive than the indigenous technology (which is often in a condition of decay), but it would also be immensely cheaper than the sophisticated, highly capital-intensive technology of modern industry. At such a level of capitalisation, very large numbers of workplaces could be created within a fairly short time; and the creation of such workplaces would be 'within reach' for the more enterprising minority within the district, not only in financial terms but also in terms of their education, aptitude, organising skill, and so forth.
This last point may perhaps be elucidated as follows: The average annual income per worker and the average capital per workplace in the developed countries appear at present to stand in a relationship of roughly 1:1. This implies, in general terms, that it takes one man-year to create one workplace, or that a man would have to save one month's earnings a year for twelve years to be able to own a workplace. If the relationship were 1:10, it would require ten man-years to create one workplace, and a man would have to save a month's earnings a year for 120 years before he could make himself owner of a workplace. This, of course, is an impossibility, and it follows that the Pounds 1,000- technology transplanted into a district which is stuck on the level of a Pounds 1-technology simply cannot spread by any process of normal growth. It cannot have a positive 'demonstration effect'; on the contrary. as can be observed all over the world, its 'demonstration effect' is wholly negative. The people, to whom the Pounds 1,000- technology is inaccessible, simply 'give up' and often cease doing even those things which they had done previously.
The intermediate technology would also fit much more smoothly into the relatively unsophisticated environment in which it is to be utilised. The equipment would be fairly simple and therefore understandable, suitable for maintenance and repair on the spot. Simple equipment is normally far less dependent on raw materials of great purity or exact specifications and much more adaptable to market fluctuations than highly sophisticated equipment.
Men are more easily trained: supervision, control, and organisation are simpler; and there is far less vulnerability to un- foreseen difficulties.
# Objections Raised and Discussed
Since the idea of intermediate technology was first put forward, a number of objections have been raised. The most immediate objections are psychological: 'You are trying to withhold the best and make us put up with something inferior and outdated.' This is the voice of those who are not in need. who can help themselves and want to be assisted in reaching a higher standard of living at once. It is not the voice of those with whom we are here concerned, the poverty-stricken multitudes who lack any real basis of existence, whether in rural or in urban areas, who have neither 'the best' nor 'the second best' but go short of even the most essential means of subsistence. One sometimes wonders how many 'development economists' have any real comprehension of the condition of the poor.
There are economists and econometricians who believe that development policy can be derived from certain allegedly fixed ratios, such as the capital output ratio. Their argument runs as follows: The amount of available capital is given. Now, you may concentrate it on a small number of highly capitalised workplaces, or you may spread it thinly over a large number of cheap workplaces. If you do the latter, you obtain less total output than if you do the former: you therefore fail to achieve the quickest possible rate of economic growth. Dr Kaldor, for instance, claims that 'research has shown that the most modern machinery produces much more output per unit of capital invested than less sophisticated machinery which employs more people'. Not only capital' but also 'wages goods' are held to be a given quantity, and this quantity determines 'the limits on wages employment in any country at any given time'.
'If we can employ only a limited number of people in wage labour, then let us employ them in the most productive way, so that they make the biggest possible contribution to the national output, because that will also give the quickest rate of economic growth. You should not go deliberately out of your way to reduce productivity in order to reduce the amount of capital per worker. This seems to me nonsense because you may find that by increasing capital per worker tenfold you increase the output per worker twenty fold. There is no question from every point of view of the superiority of the latest and more capitalistic technologies.''
The first thing that might be said about these arguments is that they are evidently static in character and fail to take account of the dynamics of development. To do justice to the real situation it is necessary to consider the reactions and capabilities of people, and not confine oneself to machinery or abstract concepts. As we have seen before, it is wrong to assume that the most sophisticated equipment, transplanted into an unsophisticated environment, will be regularly worked at full capacity, and if capacity utilisation is low, then the capital / output ratio is also low. It is therefore fallacious to treat capital / output ratios as technological facts, when they are so largely dependent on quite other factors.
The question must be asked, moreover, whether there is such a law, as Dr Kaldor asserts, that the capital/output ratio grows if capital is concentrated on fewer workplaces. No-one with the slightest industrial experience would ever claim to have noticed the existence of such a 'law', nor is there any foundation for it in any science. Mechanisation and automation are introduced to increase the productivity of labour, i.e. the worker/output ratio, and their effect on the capital/output ratio may just as well be negative as it may be positive. Countless examples can be quoted where advances in technology eliminate workplaces at the cost of an additional input of capital without affecting the volume of output. It is therefore quite untrue to assert that a given amount of capital invariably and necessarily produces the biggest total output when it is concentrated on the smallest number of workplaces.
The greatest weakness of the argument, however, lies in taking 'capital' and even 'wages goods' - as 'given quantities' in an under-employed economy. Here again, the static outlook inevitably leads to erroneous conclusions. The central concern of development policy, as I have argued already, must be the creation of work opportunities for those who, being unemployed, are consumers - on however miserable a level - without contributing anything to the fund of either 'wages goods' or 'capital'. Employment is the very precondition of everything else. The output of an idle man is nil, whereas the output of even a poorly equipped man can be a positive contribution, and this contribution can be to 'capital' as well as to 'wages goods'. The distinction between those two is by no means as definite as the econometricians are inclined to think, because the definition of 'capital' itself depends decisively on the level of technology employed.
Let us consider a very simple example. Some earth-moving job has to be done in an area of high unemployment. There is a wide choice of technologies, ranging from the most modern earth- moving equipment to purely manual work without tools of any kind. The 'output' is fixed by the nature of the job, and it is quite clear that the capital / output ratio will be highest, if the input of 'capital' is kept lowest. If the job were done without any tools, the capital/output ratio would be infinitely large, but the productivity per man would be exceedingly low. If the job were done at the highest level of modern technology, the capital/output ratio would be low and the productivity per man very high. Neither of these extremes is desirable, and a middle way has to be found. Assume some of the unemployed men were first set to work to make a variety of tools, including wheel-barrows and the like, while others were made to produce various 'wages goods'. Each of these lines of production in turn could be based on a wide range of different technologies, from the simplest to the most sophisticated. The task in every case would be to find an intermediate technology which obtains a fair level of productivity without having to resort to the purchase of expensive and sophisticated equipment. The outcome of the whole venture would be an economic development going far beyond the completion of the initial earth-moving Project. With a total input of 'capital' from outside which might be much smaller than would have been involved in the acquisition of the most modern earth-moving equipment, and an input of (previously unemployed) labour much greater than the 'modern' method would have demanded, not only a given project would have been completed, but a whole community would have been set on the path of development. I say, therefore, that the dynamic approach to development. which treats the choice of appropriate, intermediate technologies as the central issue, opens up avenues of constructive action, which the static, econometric approach totally fails to recognise. This leads to the next objection which has been raised against the idea of intermediate technology. It is argued that all this might be quite promising if it were not for a notorious shortage of entrepreneurial ability in the under-developed countries. This scarce resource should therefore be utilised in the most concentrated way, in places where it has the best chances of success and should be endowed with the finest capital equipment the world can offer. Industry, it is thus argued, should be established in or near the big cities, in large integrated units, and on the highest possible level of capitalisation per workplace.
The argument hinges on the assumption that 'entrepreneurial ability' is a fixed and given quantity, and thus again betrays a purely static point of view. It is, of course, neither fixed nor given, being largely a function of the technology to be employed Men quite incapable of acting as entrepreneurs on the level of modern technology may nonetheless be fully capable of making a success of a small-scale enterprise set up on the basis of intermediate technology - for reasons already explained above In fact, it seems to me, that the apparent shortage of entrepreneurs in many developing countries today is precisely the result of the 'negative demonstration effect' of a sophisticated technology infiltrated into an unsophisticated environment. The introduction of an appropriate, intermediate technology would not be likely to founder on any shortage of entrepreneurial ability. Nor would it diminish the supply of entrepreneurs for enterprises in the modem sector; on the contrary, by spreading familiarity with systematic, technical modes of production over the entire population it would undoubtedly help to increase the supply of the required talent.
Two further arguments have been advanced against the idea of intermediate technology - that its products would require protection within the country and would be unsuitable for export. Both arguments are based on mere surmise. In fact a considerable number of design studies and costings, made for specific products in specific districts, have universally demonstrated that the products of an intelligently chosen intermediate technology could actually be cheaper than those of modern factories in the nearest big city. Whether or not such products could be exported is an open question: the unemployed are not contributing to exports now, and the primary task is to put them to work so that they will produce useful goods from local materials for local use,
# Applicability of Intermediate Technology
The applicability of intermediate technology is, of course, not universal. There are products which are themselves the typical outcome of highly sophisticated modern industry and cannot be produced except by such an industry. These products, at the same time, are not normally an urgent need of the poor. What the poor need most of all is simple things budding materials, clothing, household goods, agricultural implements and a better return for their agricultural products. They also most urgently need in many places: trees, water, and crop storage facilities. Most agricultural populations would be helped immensely if they could themselves do the first stages of processing their products. All these are ideal fields for intermediate technology.
There are, however, also numerous applications of a more ambitious kind. I quote two examples from a recent report: 'The first relates to the recent tendency (fostered by the policy of most African, Asian and Latin American governments of having oil refineries in their own territories, however small their markets) for international firms to design small petroleum refineries with low capital investment per unit of output and a low total capacity, say from 5,000 to 30,000 barrels daily, These units are as efficient and low-cost as the much bigger and more capital-intensive refineries corresponding to conventional design. The second example relates to "package plants" for ammonia production, also recently designed for small markets. According to some provisional data, the investment cost per ton in a "package plant" with a sixty-tonsa-day capacity may be about 30,000 dollars, whereas a conventionally designed unit, with a daily capacity of 100 tons (which is, for a conventional plant, very small) would require an investment of approximately 50,000 dollars per ton.'
The idea of intermediate technology does not imply simply a 'going back' in history to methods now out-dated although a systematic study of methods employed in the developed countries, say, a hundred years ago could indeed yield highly suggestive results. It is too often assumed that the achievement of western science, pure and applied, lies mainly in the apparatus and machinery that have been developed from it, and that a rejection of the apparatus and machinery would be tantamount to a rejection of science. This is an excessively superficial view. The real achievement lies in the accumulation of precise knowledge, and this knowledge can be applied in a great variety of ways, of which the current application in modern industry is only one. The development of an intermediate technology, therefore, means a genuine forward movement into new territory, where the enormous cost and complication o~ production methods for the sake of labour saving and job elimination is avoided and technology is made appropriate for labour surplus societies, That the applicability of intermediate technology is extremely wide, even if not universal, will be obvious to anyone who takes the trouble to look for its actual applications today. Examples can be found in every developing country and, indeed, in the advanced countries as well. What. then is missing? It is simply that the brave and able practitioners of intermediate technology do not know of one another, do not support one another, and cannot be of assistance to those who want to follow a similar road but do not know how to get started. They exist, as it were, outside the mainstream of official and popular interest. 'The catalogue issued by the European or United States exporter of machinery is still the prime source of technical assistance" and the institutional arrangements for dispensing aid are generally such that there is an insurmountable bias in favour of large-scale projects on the level of the most modern technology. If we could turn official and popular interest away from the grandiose projects and to the real needs of the poor, the battle could be won. A study of intermediate technologies as they exist today already would disclose that there is enough knowledge and experience to set everybody to work, and where there are gaps, new design studies could be made very quickly. Professor Gadgil, director of the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics at Poona, has outlined three possible approaches to the development of intermediate technology, as follows: 'One approach may be to start with existing techniques in traditional industry and to utilise knowledge of advanced techniques to transform them suitably. Transformation implies retaining some elements in existing equipment, skills and procedures.... This process of improvement of traditional technology is extremely important, particularly for that part of the transition in which a holding operation for preventing added technological unemployment appears necessary... , 'Another approach would be to start from the end of the most advanced technology and to adapt and adjust so as to meet the requirements of the intermediate.... In some cases, the process would also involve adjustment to special local circumstances such as type of fuel or power available. 'A third approach may be to conduct experimentation and research in a direct effort to establish intermediate technology. However, for this to be fruitfully undertaken it would be necessary to define, for the scientist and the technician, the limiting economic circumstances. These are chiefly the scale of operations aimed at and the relative costs of capital and labour and the scale of their inputs - possible or desirable. Such direct effort at establishing intermediate technology would undoubtedly be conducted against the background of knowledge of advanced technology in the field.
However, it could cover a much wider range of possibilities than the effort through the adjustment and adaptation approach' Professor Gadgil goes on to plead that:
'The main attention of the personnel on the applied side of National Laboratories, technical institutes and the large university departments must be concentrated on this work The advancement of advanced technology in every field is being adequately pursued in the developed countries; the special adaptations and adjustments required in India are not and are not likely to be given attention in any other country. They must, therefore, obtain the highest priority in our plans. Intermediate technology should become a national concern and not, as at present, a neglected field assigned to a small number of specialists, set apart" A similar plea might be made to supranational agencies which would be well-placed to collect, systematise, and develop the scattered knowledge and experience already existing in this vitally important field. In summary we can conclude:
The 'dual economy' in the developing countries will remain for the foreseeable future. The modem sector will not be able to absorb the whole.
if the non-modern sector is not made the object of special development efforts, it will continue to disintegrate; this disintegration will continue to manifest itself in mass unemployment and mass migration into the metropolitan areas; and this will poison economic life in the modern sector as well.
The poor can be helped to help themselves, but only by making available to them a technology that recognises the economic boundaries and Limitations of poverty - an inter- mediate technology. Action programmes on a national and supranational basis are needed to develop intermediate technologies suitable for the promotion of full employment in developing countries.