Peter Haas

Interview with Peter Haas, Founder and Executive Director, Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group

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Peter Haas launched AIDG, the Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group, to help businesses solve infrastructure problems in villages by banding together and working on village scale projects. 

He started AIDG when he compared two pig farms in Cuba. One worked well because it had a bio-digester that provided energy, saved trees, and solved waste problems. The other did not and was awash in pit waste. He saw first hand what the right technology could do.

One of AIDG's endeavors is the Product Place Program which allows people in the US with design and engineering skills to work on village needs. It matches designers and engineers with villages that are willing to serve as test sites for the products the American teams design. It is a powerful source of data to designers to use to create and adapt products for developing country environments.

Peter received a B.A. from Yale University in philosophy and psychology. Before founding AIDG, he worked both in the information technology field as a consultant in network topology, RF and wireless, and on a sustainable organic farm doing infrastructure improvement work.

Peter's advice is to social entrepreneurs:  “Have a good exit strategy and real, definable goals for the enterprise. Also, be realistic in your goals – understand from the beginning what you will do if the project takes longer than you first anticipated.”

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