This does illustrate my idea very well.

I've been gathering more information on 3rd world development, and mentoring/community approaches seem to be doing far better than big, national-improvement projects. In Tanzania, a province managed to cut disease drastically without any additional funds, just by using modern statistical methods and aggressive preventative medicine.

Anyway, what you're describing is part of it. I'm looking at pretty much your knife maker or bike repair shop type situations-- where giving a subsistence farming village some tiny industrial capability might allow them to start accumulating wealth. We'll see-- it's turning out that security becomes a very big deal in many parts of the world when a village starts actually doing well, and dealing with that is filling up my report. <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

Thanks so much to everyone for the advice/links!