I am in no way an expert on developmental aid, but one thing that has always bothered me about (my impression of) it is how the overall technological "ecosystem

I am in no way an expert on developmental aid, but one thing that has always bothered me about (my impression of) it is how the overall technological "ecosystem" and historical processes seem to be entirely ignored. It's very much just, "here's this individual disconnected thing that is supposed to solve a problem" and not "our civilization has centuries of thought and development behind this thing, so here's how we got from there to here, and here are a few intermediary-but-now-outdated forms that illustrate progress." The approach is totally out of context and doesn't seem to be interested in setting up a sustainable tech ecosystem that can eventually support itself. It's just a one-off thing and it keeps the recipient dependent on the ecosystem where the single item came from. Again, I'm not an expert at all, but historically Japan "solved" this problem by bringing in tons of foreign experts and paying them for their knowledge and training, with the result that Japan became an industrial power in less than a century. I have never seen a similar approach taken in modern development. Singapore, maybe?