For some of the world’s poorest people, the biggest impact can come from fostering creative problem-solving.

David L. Chandler, MIT News Office

When it comes to really improving the lives of some of the world’s poorest people, the first step can be as simple as handing them sheets of paper. 

That was the first exercise in classes taught by MIT D-Lab founder Amy Smith and graduate student Kofi Taha during workshops they held last year in Uganda, one of Africa’s most impoverished and war-ravaged nations. To get the villagers thinking creatively about addressing some of their own problems and concerns, Smith and Taha posed a challenge for them: They were asked to engineer a way, using just two sheets of ordinary paper, to support several ears of corn up off the ground.

For the workshop participants — rural people being relocated back to their small, remote villages after more than a decade interned in camps for those displaced by Uganda’s internal warfare — the challenge was daunting at first. But they quickly took to it, devising a great variety of clever ways to support the corn with cylinders, cones and cups made by folding (no gluing or cutting allowed) the sheets of paper. Right away, they began to feel more capable, and more ready for their next challenges.