# TEDxEWB - Vinay Gupta - Enabling Humanitarian Innovation > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [710]. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages. ## Where this source sits - Source: video, 2010-06-03 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtqtsH8J8m4. Text: automatic captions, partly corrected - On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the money step (Global Village Development Bank, 2009), before the ledgers step (Ethereum launch, 2015). - How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): The individual-needs base of SCIM, applied to humanitarian innovation. - Career works it belongs to: - Small is Profitable (2002): Co-edited Rocky Mountain Institute book on the hidden benefits of right-sized, distributed power; The... - Course of Action (2006): Plan showing five actions with appropriate technology could prevent about a third of yearly deaths. - Saving the World on the Cheap (2007): Essay on a new way for charities and governments to fund lifesaving engineering. - Six ways people die (2008): Framework: people die of heat, cold, hunger, thirst, illness or injury, so infrastructure has to answer... - Global Village Development Bank (2009): Design for a decentralized development bank: infrastructure funded by decentralized finance, through legal... - Hexayurt Country (2010): Plan to rehouse Haiti after the January 2010 earthquake in Hexayurts, financed with the money that would... - Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of: - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. - STAR-TIDES: The National Defense University project and the papers around it. - environment / green capitalism: Green economics: from oil efficiency to markets for facts about products. - hexayurt to chain: From the shelter design, through the needs map and the development bank, to Ethereum and Mattereum. - nuclear / panflu: Pandemic, evacuation and rehousing plans. - social enterprise: Enterprises that turn money into social capital and back: the capital conversion matrix from the Rocky Mountain... - Ideas developed here: SCIM / six ways to die - Topics: disaster / refugee / food (36%); Burning Man shelter building (18%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: humanitarian innovation (4 here; 9 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); Haiti (4 here; 42 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 3 undated); Appropedia (2 here; 34 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 3 undated); water purification (1 here; 17 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 3 undated); Red Cross (1 here; 36 sources in all, earliest dated 2002); too cold (1 here; 40 sources in all, earliest dated 2008, 7 undated); too hot (1 here; 42 sources in all, earliest dated 2008, 6 undated); Iraq (1 here; 45 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 2 undated); India (1 here; 88 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); supply chain (1 here; 92 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 4 undated) - Importance: core-text score 0.59 (1.00 is the top), number 47 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - Related sources: - [270] [Hope For The World (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/270.md): same career work: Saving the World on the Cheap - [341] [Vinay Gupta - Reykjavik Digital Freedoms Conference -... (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/341.md): same career work: Global Village Development Bank - On the same works, just before: [13] [Hexayurt Country (2010)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/13.md); [90] [The Hexayurt in Haiti – a technical description | The... (2010)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/90.md); [14] [Hexayurt Country (2010)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/14.md) - On the same works, just after: [224] [The Unplugged: The Videos - Shareable (2010)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/224.md); [76] [Free housing and 21st Century Leadership | The... (2010)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/76.md); [366] ["Through the Looking Glass" - Vinay Gupta - Ireland... (2010)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/366.md) ## Reading it Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it. Cite as: TEDxEWB - Vinay Gupta - Enabling Humanitarian Innovation, video, 2010-06-03, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtqtsH8J8m4; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [710], https://guptaoption.com/texts/710.md. Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps. ## Passages [0:11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtqtsH8J8m4&t=11s) so humanitarian Innovation um the sort of starting point for this is that um initially just about everybody lived in what you might call the developing World um this was the developing World 3 4 500 years ago and then we went through a process of developing and our world changed radically so we now live 20 30 40 years longer than people in much of the rest of the world and those people are defined as the developing World um the notion that development is a process that we ourselves went through relatively recently is something that's often left out of the dialogue uh and this has you know links to things like colonialism and the history by which we managed to develop it wasn't just a series of technological breakthroughs so right now every year of all causes about 60 million people die 60 something million are born 60 million die and this is life the tricky part is that 20 million of the people who die which is roughly a third of all death is death from poverty and this is not simple single issue death it's a set of things that I call the poverty cluster [1:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtqtsH8J8m4&t=77s) where you've got a set of things which interact where people are working too hard they don't have proper medical care they're exposed to you know waterborne disease and as a result they die 10 15 years uh younger than they would have otherwise um you can see this kind of thing particularly in children infant mortality is a wide variety of causes and these systems interact so most of this death is preventable death uh because we don't have these problems we found a way of preventing these deaths reasonable right so um this is the permanent [1:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtqtsH8J8m4&t=113s) disaster poverty is like a natural disaster but it's running all the time over most of the planet and basically [2:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtqtsH8J8m4&t=123s) there are six things that people die of they are too hot and too cold hungry thirsty ill or injured and this is most of what happens uh hunger and thirst are typically um supply issues you've got to grow the food you have to bring the water um hot and cold are shelter issues insufficient housing insufficient clothing and illness and injury illness is largely public health and injury is substantially violence with a few accidents thrown in uh there are times when you have very bad years for injury like the Rwanda genocide a substantial percentage of all the people who died in the year of the Rwandan Genocide died in the den genocide something like 4 million people were killed 60 million died of natural causes so that year a you know 4% actually more 8% of the people who died in the world died in that genocide the stuff is really really serious so what what protects us from these kinds of causes here is infrastructure and if you think about your house your house is actually a very sophisticated machine and it's a termination point for trillions of pounds worth of services so you have water that comes out your Taps and that's connected to water pipes and the water pipes are connected to water purification plants and they're connected to electrical engineers and chemical engineers and the industrial supply chain they're connected to Municipal financing and the government and this entire set of systems maintains your water supply it maintains your sewage Supply um all of this kind of stuff is infrastructure but this kind of stuff is not easy to roll out in the developing World we're not going to rebuild Victorian London's sewer system in mosambi not the way this is going to work um we seem to have gone forward one could you go back one slide thanks so if you think about this model um then apply it to these infrastructures what are the big Killers we've heard a little about water we've heard a little about stoves sanitation it's another huge issue um improved farming handling the food supply issues is several Million Lives a year uh world food and agriculture organization estimates that malnutrition is a factor in something like half of all death globally right and there are relatively simple fixes for the vast majority of these problems right agriculture there's an outfit called 1acre fund which is operating in Africa which has a one-year [4:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtqtsH8J8m4&t=273s) training program where they go to your farm and they come around at Harvest Time and they come around at planting time and they come around with a training course and they'll double your food production and half your infant mortality for you and they've got about 14,000 Farms are doing this on right now so radical breakthroughs are possible in all of these areas and we could be talking about saving 10 15 million lives a year that's a quart water of all human death and this is a big deal so why isn't it done yet given that this is possible and given that the costs are often in the region of $50 to $100 per household for the entire package why has it been done everywhere um in 2003 uh The Economist published a book called small as profitable which is about electrical infrastructure and small as profitable discusses how you evaluate the efficiency and the cost of an electrical grid and it goes through about 400 pages of things like portfolio Theory and load shape matching to they come to the conclusion that the big problem that we have is accountancy that the accounting practices which are standard in the energy industry very poorly reflect the value of services like solar panels and wind generators because the solar panels and the wind generators generate the power directly on top of the consumer who needs it and the efficiencies from doing the uh system where you put the production and the consumption close to each other aren't accounted for in the the standard models so if you want to provide let's say electricity to Egypt in let's say 1960 you wind up with the Awan Dam which costs some hundreds of millions of dollars and screws up their agricultural ecosystem for Generations right what they really needed at that point was maybe a little power in a lot of places rather than a lot of power in a few places and this is this longtail thing [6:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtqtsH8J8m4&t=383s) that what we're talking about is a longtail approach to providing infrastructure for the developing World household by household individual by individual Village by Village um why is that difficult it means managing the capital that goes into these investments in a completely different way it means a generational turnover in the organizations Thomas discusses um the anatomy of a scientific revolution where he basically says that professors over the age of 30 don't change their minds you grow up with one model and you're going to keep applying that model until you die in most cases so there's a natural buffer of 10 15 20 years in organizations before they can begin to to think about new ways of doing things and finally you wind up with thank you where did it go um the decentralization [7:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtqtsH8J8m4&t=427s) of the political Capital um the situation in Iraq is that because they're attempting to rebuild uh centralized power grid and water Grid in a war zone they're failing you just cannot protect what we call linear assets things like pipelines or tree structured assets things like a water grid because you just can't have enough people to keep an eye on those systems to protect them so the political implication of this radical decentralization is you generate a loan for hundreds of millions of dollars to a country to build their water infrastructure and then it goes out into 20 250,000 small grants and that's a very different style of politics it's a different way of handling the money it's a different way of making the decisions and that's going to take time to transform open source is just the beginning of a process so um let me come to the Innovation Gap um humanitarian Innovation is absolutely cash starved and glacially slow even though vast numbers of people were dying and the reason is that there are structural impediments in the way that risk and money are handled in the humanitarian sector which have ground Innovation to a halt for four generations um the example of innovation in a safety critical area that works is medical Innovation so if you're a doctor and you want to test a new medical procedure you write up what it is you want to do you write down why you think it'll work and you take it to a medical ethics board and the medical ethics board says we are doctors we're experts in the field that is stupid no experiment dead if you come back to them and you rewrite the protocol and you say you were right that was stupid this is not stupid and they say okay now the medical ethics board is responsible they're like a court of law they've taken responsibility for any risk implied in the study they've said you're doing a reasonable thing go for it now in the humanitarian World there is no generally agreed on equivalent to the medical ethics board there's nowhere that you can go with an experiment in a humanitarian context and have somebody sign off and take responsibility for the experiment you want to conduct could you un poke it and the result of this is that you wind up with an enormously slowed up rate of progress because there's no way to get ethical approval in a unified way you have to go and try and convince somebody in organization who's got a bunch of field experience that what you're doing isn't daed and if you make a mistake it's now their career that's on the line and it's handled an informal way very [9:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtqtsH8J8m4&t=577s) problematic similarly if you're a big NGO typically speaking you raise money to feed people or you raise money to do water stuff if you take a $100,000 and you put it into a research project on a technology and the technology turns out not to work in the field people will turn around and say this money was wasted right no it wasn't wasted we learned that this doesn't work no no that's wasted no we we learned it doesn't work right the idea that you're funding failure you're paying to discover that some things work and some things don't isn't that the heart of medical research right but what's the equivalent structure in the humanitarian World who's going to give me some money to go out and try something that may not work potentially harming people if it fails really badly nobody but every single time you go to the doctor you're sitting on top of hundreds of years of practice of that way of doing things medical innovation came by handling the ethical risks and funding failure um and these questions about who owns the risk ethical and financial are at the heart of why humanitarian inovation is so slow in the humanitarian sector the risk is not clearly owned so it's managed in informal ways so this is the thing that I'm best known for it's called a hexayurt and um have any of you ever done any construction raise your hands if you've uh recently handled plywood okay okay so the wall of this thing is a single sheet of plywood you see the Red Square single sheet of plywood the roof section is half a sheet of plywood cut on the diagonal and uh for our applications in a humanitarian context probably you're going to put the thing together with little blocks of wood and a screw gun it takes about two or three hours to build the first one with a new team and after that they can do one every hour and a half or maybe even an hour if it's a bunch of big guys and the cost um for a model that would work in Haiti is probably about $200 if you're in a less challenging environment it might be $100 a unit so um 50% of the price of a relief tent right a relief tent is usually something like $350 plus another $100 for Air Freight these things are about $100 and there's going to be another $100 of logistics charges and paying people to build them so it's very cheap it's multi-year life use a tent will rot in 3 six months in some climates a year in others but you certainly don't get two seasons out of a tent whereas a hexayurt will last as long as plywood does in that environment that can be a number of years what's going on right um scalable local build the locals [12:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtqtsH8J8m4&t=727s) do all of the construction themselves you have teams that train them probably you would train with the military and then You' have uh the locals take over you could design them ahead of time and then train ahead of time for areas like Bangladesh where you have repeating disasters this is just a good way of doing things right does this all kind of seem like it might be a promising approach to doing Sheltering cheap easy local build durable quite large seems like it be to dry I've been trying to get people through a field test of this technology since 2002 right in eight years having talked to something like two dozen of the world's leading humanitarian organizations and three or four different arms of the US government I have succeeded in getting zero units tested and that is not because I an ineffective human being it's because nobody owns the risk right I mean I've done a lot of other things in that 8 years but right nobody owns the risk so nobody's willing to try it I talked to one specific National Red Cross I'm not going to say which country for three straight years about trying to get this thing tested in South America it's $2,000 to get some built and leave them in somebody's backyard and see whether they blow over right H tricky because now of course we have this problem in Haiti and this is where you see the payload right in Haiti right now we have a million people most of whom would like to be under plastic sheets but nobody's even given them plastic sheets yet the current plan is to spend something between $1,000 and $3,000 per family which will be 250 million to $750 million that's a huge chunk of the Reconstruction money just to build them transitional shelters which are big wooden frames with sheet metal roofs on top I think I can get reasonable quality Sheltering for those people faster and for 10% of the cost of the current option right but how's that going to work I'm not an NGO I'm not the kind of person to start an NGO and the existing structures are not fast and they haven't done the research already right the Saving Grace in this is that science for Humanity has picked up the design and is raising money to get the engineering done so that we can actually build a unit that will work for Haiti and show people a word example but this is an example of the problem that you have when you do not build structure to absorb the risk of doing real research this is critical if we're going to make humanitarian Innovation work we [14:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtqtsH8J8m4&t=877s) have to build real structures to handle the risks of doing research and we have to build real structures to fund failure because if we don't we don't have the solutions when we need them um this situation is inevitably going to change there are real forces in play which are moving this forward um you just saw clay sher's talk all of this stuff is is really happening in the developing world have any of you seen the video of the African man who built a windmill from car parts right now he's the first person who's done that kind of innovation in the field that I'd heard of but I've been looking for that man for about 10 years right what's going to happen very quickly is that the primary locus of humanitarian Innovation is going to move from the developed world to the developing world it's going to be the one in a million Geniuses of whom that are 4,000 in the developing World sitting down with their new internet connections and Publishing what they know and massively accelerating the space and time with which they have to think and cooperate to solve their own problems they're going to take these little seeds that the Nos and the governments have funded in the past few couple you know decades they're going to take those little seeds that we've built and they're going to pick that stuff up and run with it to places that we can imagine um there's a website called appropedia which is kind of the uh Canary in the Min shaft for this it's the place where I watch for that power transfer happening appropedia has got about 10,000 articles and was arranged by a Consortium of white males um and there's five of these guys who are devoting their you know the bulk of their free time in a good chunk of their professional lives to building a Wiki with appropriate technology and they're just waiting and waiting and waiting for the transfer of responsibility and the transfer of workload to go from them who are unsuited for the job because they don't live in The Villages to the Village Engineers who are coming out of the woodwork on all sides year by year by year by year Barefoot solar engineers in India the Barefoot College the guy with his wind turbine all this stuff is the beginnings of the transfer of innovation in humanitarian arenas from a predominantly developed World activity funded by NGS to primarily developing World activity funded by the people themselves and what I would like to see is us develop a better way of helping these people along both with technical resources and with grant funding um does that sound like a good idea right we can help really Foster these approaches this this the [17:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtqtsH8J8m4&t=1027s) decentralization and um the absorption of Risk by partnering with many different groups of different kinds to solve the real problem so that's it thank --- End of [710] TEDxEWB - Vinay Gupta - Enabling Humanitarian Innovation. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [224](https://guptaoption.com/texts/224.md) The Unplugged: The Videos - Shareable (2010); the most closely related, [270](https://guptaoption.com/texts/270.md) Hope For The World (2017); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.