ABSTRACT
When problems inhibiting development in the Third World are discussed, attention is typically focused on the inadequacies of the developing countries—deficiencies in resource base, poverty, lack of education, inadequate infrastructures, and insufficient or inadequate technologies. Clarence Kooi points out that a number of problems hindering development in the Third World originate in the affluent countries—fashion, misunderstanding (or non-acceptance) of local priorities, unreasonable expectations relative to useful life and maintenance of technologies, misunderstandings of the labor-intensiveness appropriate to a local culture, use of ineffective "low technologies," and attempts to use technologies inappropriate, for whatever reasons, to tasks at hand. Kooi draws on his experience with renewable energy projects in Western Africa to discuss the latter set of problems.
