Are our innovations trained to run "The Last Mile" ?

Among the plethora of reads for this week, right from the 6 ingenious devices designed to provide access to clean drinking water to self-adjustable eyeglasses, there was but one question lingering in my mind all along - Why do we still have a significant population who struggle from the very same problems the innovations promise to address?

What do I mean by this?

Let’s look at a couple of examples from the pre reads for this week.

1. Joshua Silver develops a self-adjustable lens that people can use to address optometric problems such as myopia and hypermetropia. The lower socioeconomic groups in developing countries who cannot afford consulting an optometrist or eye care are his target population.  670 million people are needlessly blind or vision impaired simply because they lack access  to the glasses or eye care they need[1].

What’s the impact of this innovation?  

These glasses in over a year have roughly impacted nearly 0.0089% (approx 0.01%) of his target population. While over time these figures are bound to significant increase, what’s the probability that this innovation will mark the absolute finale of this problem?

2. The 6 water purifying designs for the developing world aim at addressing the most pressing need for access to clean and safe drinking water using technology. From the article we know that as of today, 3.575 million people die every year from water-related disease. With a multitude of social innovations by the day to solve similar issues around water crisis and access, one would think that we are the brink of putting these issues to bed and believing that it all ends here. But even as of today,

a) More than 840,000 people die from a water-related disease each year, including diarrhea caused by bad drinking water, hygiene and sanitation[2].

b) Women and children spend 125 million hours collecting fresh water every day[2].

c) Individual women and children spend as many as six hours collecting fresh water daily[2].

c) Every 90 seconds a child dies from a water-related disease[2].

While the number of social innovation initiatives, ventures, products and services are beyond counting, the big question is why do these problems continue to exist despite multiple initiatives and solutions to address the same problem?

“This isn't about the biology of people; this is now about the brains, the psychology of people.” said Sendhil Mullainathan in his TED talk on “Solving social problems with a nudge” [3]

Let's take for example, the issue of sanitary facilities in Uttar Pradesh.  

The Swacch Bharat Abhiyaan (“Clean India”)  national campaign ( headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the initiative to build sanitary toilets to more than 60 million homes by 2019.

But it turns out, the problem does not end there.

“We never asked for a toilet. Now we are stuck with it,” said Natholi, 22, as he opened the squat toilet to show that it has not been used. [4]

Reports show that many toilets have gone unused or that they are being used to store grain or

clothes or to tether goats [4]!

With the growing number of social innovations, how often are we thinking about “The Last Mile problem” ?

What’s the real need of the hour- a technological innovation or design innovation or is it really a human innovation?

References:
[1] http://www.allaboutvision.com/ogs/

[2] http://www.ibtimes.com/world-water-day-2016-12-facts-things-know-2340534

[3] https://www.ted.com/talks/sendhil_mullainathan/transcript?language=en#t-838907

[4]https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/india-is-building-millions-of-toilets-but-toilet-training-could-be-a-bigger-task/2015/06/03/09d1aa9e-095a-11e5-a7ad-b430fc1d3f5c_story.html