Rule of Experts

Empowering Technologies for the Developing World

M. Bernardine Dias of TechBridgeWorld in an interview with Technology Reviewin how the


Helping the developing world isn't as easy as sending money and experts. Local values and customs have to be considered, and ultimately, the community has to become able to guide itself. M. Bernardine Dias is the director of Carnegie Mellon University's TechBridgeWorld, a group that partners with developing communities to create sustainable technological solutions to problems within those communities. In advance of her appearance at the Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT later this week, Technology Review talked with Dias about the role that technology can play in the developing world.

She talked about TechBridgeWorld's two golden rules of operation: "We never go anywhere unless we're invited--that translates to having a strong partner within that community. Second, what we do is always framed as a sharing process. We only go in as experts of technology, not to try to dictate where the community should head or what they should be doing, or should not be doing, on a larger scale."

Sounds good.

Anthropologists like Tim Mitchell have shown that expert knowledge is never as disinterested as it they seem and that the technocratic rationality they embody often works in the interest of the powerful, be they development organizations, governments, corporations - and their lastest embodiment of Public-Private Partnerships of which the academy is also often a part.