“What poor people need most is a way to make money,” writes Martin Fisher, an engineer who lived in Kenya working on development initiatives for 17 years before plowing his accrued knowledge back into KickStart, the technology transfer organization he founded with partner Nick Moon. “One of the most fundamental lessons was that the poorest people in the world are also among the most entrepreneurial—they have to be just to survive,” he writes in the catalogue for Design for the Other 90% (DFTO90), a recent exhibit at the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum that features products geared toward the billions of consumers with pennies a day, if that, of disposable income. “They do not want handouts,” Fisher writes. “They want opportunities.”
