This open access textbook introduces the emerging field of Development Engineering and its
constituent theories methods and applications. It is both a teaching text for students and a
resource for researchers and practitioners engaged in the design and scaling of technologies
for low-resource communities. The scope is broad ranging from the development of mobile
applications for low-literacy users to hardware and software solutions for providing
electricity and water in remote settings. It is also highly interdisciplinary drawing on
methods and theory from the social sciences as well as engineering and the natural sciences.
The opening section reviews the history of technology-for-development research and presents a
framework that formalizes this body of work and begins its transformation into an academic
discipline. It identifies common challenges in development and explains the book's iterative
approach of innovation implementation evaluation adaptation. Each of the next six thematic
sections focuses on a different sector: energy and environment market performance education
and labor water sanitation and health digital governance and connectivity. These thematic
sections contain case studies from landmark research that directly integrates engineering
innovation with technically rigorous methods from the social sciences. Each case study
describes the design evaluation and or scaling of a technology in the field and follows a
single form with common elements and discussion questions to create continuity and
pedagogical consistency. Together they highlight successful solutions to development
challenges while also analyzing the rarely discussed failures. The book concludes by
reiterating the core principles of development engineering illustrated in the case studies
highlighting common challenges that engineers and scientists will face in designing technology
interventions that sustainably accelerate economic development. Development Engineering
provides for the first time a coherent intellectual framework for attacking the challenges of
poverty and global climate change through the design of better technologies. It offers the
rigorous discipline needed to channel the energy of a new generation of scientists and
engineers toward advancing social justice and improved living conditions in low-resource
communities around the world.
