The world is broken because a quarter or half of the people who die every year die from being poor. They have more children so they are sure of having some reach adulthood, and the resulting overpopulation is starving them in many countries. This is an oversimplification but is the basic mess.

Utopian visions exist which show how we might address this problem at source, but – and this is critical – there appears to be no way to substantially finance research into decentralized infrastructure which is the only plausible way of reaching the villages and the slums with the lifegiving services required to cut infant mortality, population growth, and death from poverty. Governments and NGOs simply do not put real money into R&D on the technological side of poverty alleviation.

Even large foundations like Gates appear to have a blind spot where decentralized infrastructure for the poor is concerned. AIDG, AMURT-Haiti and One Acre Fund are all shoestring operations by charitable standards – a handful of employees pushing on the world’s problems.

So here’s my question: what are we going to do about this mess?