About
John Barrie
Humanitarian innovator, speaker, and designer of practical technologies for the world's poorest people.
My Story
From engineer to humanitarian designer.
John Barrie is the founder of The Appropriate Technology Collaborative and a pioneer in humanitarian design, solar power, and sustainable technology.
For more than 20 years, he has worked alongside rural communities in five countries to design practical technologies that improve health, education, and economic opportunity — tools families use every single day.
After early years in conventional engineering, a series of trips to rural Guatemala revealed how much suffering is caused by something as simple as the absence of light. That moment redirected a career — and twelve technologies later, the work continues.
His work has reached homes, classrooms, and clinics in Guatemala, Nicaragua, India, Cameroon, and Malawi, and his solar vaccine refrigerators alone have helped protect more than a million lives from preventable disease.
Today, John speaks to universities, foundations, and conferences around the world about what humanitarian engineering looks like when it actually works — and why it matters more than ever.