How could they not justify paying for 10 months of diesel to never have to then pay for diesel in the 11th month and on? There are micro-finance options available in many developing areas, should be a no-brainer with your hypothetical math.

Easily - because you don't have $1,000.

Because your current system is portable and well known in a place where land use and other rights are less solid?

Because no one around you has the technical capacity to update / maintain / repair the system?

Because if you invest in something in a less developed area - someone may come and take it (yes, this includes the govt and various officials who may start talking about permitting etc etc).

Interestingly, this same question is asked and answered at the country scale for major industries. Why ship unrefined / unprocessed product that takes up 10x the volume when you could process locally for the whole country? Because the market doesn't trust the systems in that country well enough to invest $5B that has a 20 year payback even if its "easy math".

If you want to experience some culture shock, read about some Westerners who have spent significant time living with Africans. Not just "living in Africa" in some expat enclave, but living with the people.

I don't feel I have enough of a grasp to summarize it. And I'm not saying it's bad or good in particular. I'm just saying, expect serious culture shock in this area of culture. You'll come away with a greater understanding of why attempted Western interventions have been less successful than expected, if nothing else.

Friend of mine spent 6 months in Goma working as a nurse. Came back with mild PTSD. It wasn't the nursing that did it.

Any pointers to anything to read about this?

Do you have any recommendations?

There is very little long term planning in Africa.

Poverty is a big factor in long term planning. For example in America poor people pay more for toilet paper because they can’t buy a large pack of toilet paper rolls, instead they often can only afford to buy one roll at a time. This is a well documented effect of poverty or financially constrained living.

It's not the only factor though. I've talked with my father-in-law who does a lot of work in Haiti. His observation is that it is a much more systematic problem. Kids don't learn to plan ahead because the schools only teach memorization and they don't play with toys like building blocks. It's very frustrating for him because he finds himself having to hand hold a lot when doing construction projects like building schools, even when the people doing the work are supposed to be professionals.

For example, if he orders a truckload of gravel he has to watch the entrance like a hawk and be ready to rush out the instant the truck arrives, because if he doesn't the truck will just dump the gravel right in the middle of their entrance and block everybody in until he can round up people to shovel it into wheelbarrows by hand. The idea that you might want to ask where to dump the load is not something that will ever cross the truck driver's mind. The project manager won't think about it either unless my father-in-law asks him explicitly where he is planning to store the gravel he just ordered. It's these kinds of problems day in and day out that makes reconstruction so difficult.

Learning how to think ahead is something we take for granted in the west, but it's not an innate human skill. It has to be taught. Worse, if you never learned it yourself then you won't notice that your kids lack the skill. It's a difficult cycle to break.

Possibly. It would probably be a good idea if someone helps those villages fund the new fridge. Saving that $100 per month would add up quickly.

I'm sure they're capable of multiplying by 10.

Have you met any poor people? Once you're poor you only buy something that you can afford right now, it doesn't matter that spending more would save you more money in the long run.

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”

― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

I believe HackerNews ran an article that covered a similar situation but the product involved was baby diapers. That if you're buying in bulk, from say, Costco, you can save a lot of money on baby diapers. That's good for those that can afford it. But those on welfare (in the US) will never have enough cash on hand to make that initial bulk purchase and achieve those savings. As a result they have to buy the smaller packages which are significantly more expensive and eat up much more of their welfare check.

Disposable diapers are a luxury item. Buy cloth and reuse them a hundred times. I could afford disposable and still bought cloth to save a literal crap ton of money.

Cloth diapers are a luxury item. They are for people with access to washing machines and sufficient time to handle them. They might financially seem cheaper, but poor people often need to work multiple jobs to keep their heads above the water. They can’t afford spending extra time. (Same goes for junk food vs. cooking stuff that you cheaply sourced from a market, ...)

I believe people in developing countries without access to washing machines use cloth diapers, so it’s not lack of access to washing machines. Cultural issues probably pay a role, however.

We bought ours on eBay (third hand, and they did for 3 kids and still were good enough to sell on), they were more work than disposable but certainly cheaper. But, we had a washing machine -- again, second hand (fixed and plumbed in by me).

There's also the aspect that nice things require other nice, expensive things to keep them up. Having a nice set of boots isn't going to help much if it's sitting in the rain overnight regularly.

This all points to the lesson that wealth and riches aren't the same thing. Rich people are rich because they have wealth, even poor people can amass riches, say by winning the lottery, but can't be called wealthy until they actually have wealth.

A person can become wealthy off the efforts of other people, but if we want wealth for all, then it's society itself that must hold the wealth. This was Karl Marx's conclusion, but all attempts to build a society capable of holding wealth for all failed.

So we're stuck with trickle-down, the idea that the surplus wealth of the wealthy is good enough for all.

Most rich people don’t start off poor.

Most rich people can lay out the $50 for the good boots.

Most poor people don’t turn rich.

Most poor people can’t wait to save up $50 for the good boots; they need boots now.

That's the whole point of the story.

Half my childhood we were the kind of broke where you chose between meat besides hotdogs or the electric bill. We clipped coupons, shopped for sales, and made every penny count. Never in a million years would we have bought a single roll of toilet paper at any kind of markup; we'd have done without until we had enough to get it on sale. Course if we were that broke, I'd have been sent to knock on doors asking for odd jobs until I had enough to cover whatever crisis was at hand.

I'm sure it's more of a question of whether they are able to budget for 10 months with that income.

At any given month they may only have $100 to spare, so at that point it doesn't matter if spending more upfront saves money in the long term because they may not have the amount needed for the upfront cost.