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What was needed was something that could not only match the efficiency
of the hammer mill but also use materials available to a blacksmith
in Senegal. A group of M.I.T. students had come up with some ideas,
but Smith, who had ground sorghum by hand in Botswana, knew they
weren't fast enough. So she devised a system based on an elegantly
simple element: air. She redesigned the machine to use the air passing
through the mill to separate particles. The smaller ones -- aka
flour -- get carried out while the larger ones stay behind. The
resulting machine would cost a quarter of what its predecessors
had and use far less energy.
For her work as an inventor, including the screenless hammer mill,
Smith became the first woman ever to win a Lemelson-M.I.T. Student
Prize. Past recipients of the high-profile award for inventing include
David Levy, who patented not only the smallest keypad in the world
but also a surgical technique that speeds the splicing of severed
blood vessels.
Smith's entire life is like one of her inventions, portable and
off the grid. At 41, she has no kids, no car, no retirement plan
and no desire for a Ph.D. Her official title: instructor. ''I'm
doing exactly what I want to be doing. Why would I spend six years
to get a Ph.D. to be in the position I'm in now, but with a title
after my name? M.I.T. loves that I'm doing this work. The support
is there. So I don't worry.'' It was a good thing that she won the
Collegiate Inventors award in 1999, she says, because back then
she was stretching a three-month graduate-student stipend to last
for a year and didn't know how she'd pay her rent. The $7,500 prize
came just in time.
Likewise, the inventors who most inspire her will never strike
it rich. ''There are geniuses in Africa, but they're not getting
the press,'' she says. She gushes about Mohammed Bah Abba, a Nigerian
teacher who came up with the pot-within-a-pot system. With nothing
more than a big terra-cotta bowl, a little pot, some sand and water,
Abba created a refrigerator -- the rig uses evaporation rather than
electricity to keep vegetables cool. Innovations that target the
poorest of the poor don't have to be complicated to make a big difference.
The best solution is sometimes the most obvious.
Smith, of course, aims to design such hidden-in-plain-sight tools
and deliver them to the needy. But she also wants to change people's
understanding of what it means to be an inventor. To this end, she
is a co-founder of the Ideas (Innovation Development Enterprise
Action) competition at M.I.T.; students work with a community partner
to solve a problem for the disenfranchised. Last year's winners,
for instance, included a team that developed a kit for removing
land mines so that farmers in places like Zimbabwe no longer have
to improvise with hoes and rakes.
Success in the Ideas competition, as well as in the kind of design
that Smith pursues, requires humility, because your masterpiece
may end up looking like a bunch of rocks or a pile of sand. And
since you'll be required to do extensive fieldwork to understand
the problem you're solving, it also demands the skills of a crack
Peace Corps volunteer, someone who remains cheerful even when the
truck breaks down, the food runs out and you're the one who has
to sleep next to the goat.
Women have the advantage here, unlike other branches of engineering.
''I know how to be self-deprecating,'' Smith says. ''The traditional
male engineer is not taught that way.'' That engineer, were he trying
to figure out an agricultural problem in Botswana, might consult
with men, but that wouldn't get him very far. ''In Africa, the women
are the farmers. Women invented domesticated crops. If you're talking
to the right people, they should be a group of elderly women with
their hair up in bandannas.''
As improbable as it may sound, Smith's brand of invention is moving
into the mainstream. That is because her clients -- the disenfranchised
in Africa, Haiti, Brazil, India -- are increasingly able to secure
loans. The concept of microfinance, which first took off in the
1970's in Bangladesh, has gathered force throughout the developing
world, giving impoverished people the capital they need to start
small businesses and buy materials. According to Elizabeth Littlefield
of the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor, a microfinance group
within the World Bank, the integration of tiny loan-making operations
into mainstream banking could bring billions of new consumers into
the global marketplace over the next few decades. There have already
been some surprising strides made. In India, for example, banks
have set up solar-powered kiosks in out-of-the-way villages, giving
clients access to financial services in places where there is not
even electricity. But what will they invest in? The rural poor will
need machines designed for their needs. And that will, in turn,
create demand for new kinds of technologies.
