Mission Statement
Over 2.1 billion people live without access to basic infrastructure services such as clean water, sanitation and electricity. Another billion people live in squatter cities, with minimal infrastructure. The great majority of these people illuminate their homes with kerosene lamps, cook their food over wood fires, and carry in clean water. Living like this, with poor sanitation leads to disease and early death.
The Appropriate Technology Collaborative (ATC) is a 501 (c)(3) not-for-profit organization whose purpose is “To design, develop, demonstrate and distribute appropriate technological solutions for meeting the basic human needs of low income people in the developing world. ATC works in collaboration with our clients and other nonprofits (NGOs) to create technologies that are culturally sensitive, environmentally responsible and locally repairable in order to improve the quality of life, enhance safety, and reduce adverse impacts on their environment.”
Our design partners are the people and the communities whom we serve. We create long term relationships with our client communities so that we can better understand and design for their particular needs.
We make our designs available online, licensed through Creative Commons for anyone in the developing world to use or improve upon.
For our most recent news please check out the Appropriate Technology Collaborative Blog.
Please see the article about the Appropriate Technology Collaborative in the Ann Arbor News. Click Here
John Barrie, the Appropriate Technology Collaborative Executive Director has been awarded a 2008 Lindbergh Foundation Grant for “Designing and Prototyping a Highly Efficient Replacement for Kerosene Lamps for Rural Guatemala and Nicaragua”. The prestigious Lindbergh Grant will be used to document existing conditions in Guatemala and Nicaragua and to then design an easy assemble LED based light using recycled cell phone parts. Local engineers in Guatemala will be part of the ATC Design team for this project.
More at: The University of Michigan
The Appropriate Technology Collaborative student sponsored team won the 2007 Edison Prize at Michigan State Univeristy for the design of a solar powered refrigerator – designed to be constructable using locally available materials in rural Africa.
John Barrie and Dr. Norbert Muller won the Boston Innovation Prize for the design of a super efficient air conditioning system. The AC uses water vapor as the refrigerant gas and a novel turbine to pump the gas at very high velocities. More at: ZDNet