The Appropriate Technology Movement in South America

Born in the 1960s, appropriate technology (AT) began as a reaction against wholly blueprint developments involving large-scale Western technologies, whose industrial contexts were ill-suited to the poor (Carr, 1985). The basic idea of AT was to try to help people develop out of the situations they were in by providing technologies appropriate to those situations, conservative in their use of materials and resources, but which afforded some improvement in the users’ economic and social circumstances. What started with just a few centres of experimentation in AT during the 1960s grew during the 1970s until it became a global grassroots innovation movement in the 1980s, with an estimated thousand institutions worldwide (Whitecombe and Carr, 1982).