Research and practice in international development focuses on reducing risks and improving the quality of life for people living in developing regions of the world. Much of this work encompasses the closely related goals of poverty reduction, safeguarding human health and natural resources, providing basic education, and encouraging social justice and equality. But in pursuit of these goals, development practitioners have had to confront a number of challenges. Some, which admittedly are not unique to international development contexts, involve helping local people to: (1) recognize and understand the nature and magnitude of the risks they face; (2) identify and characterize situation-specific objectives intended to guide decisions; and (3) become meaningfully involved in the design, evaluation, and selection of a preferred risk management option. Other challenges, however, are rather unique to development-specific contexts and include a deep mistrust of outsiders, language and cultural barriers, and low levels of education and literacy. In confronting these challenges, many providers of support and aid to developing countries have simply exported expert-driven decision support process that, in our experience, have largely failed to accurately capture the full spectrum of objectives and concerns that are of import and relevance to local stakeholders. With this as backdrop, our presentation will report the results of research we conducted in East Africa. With support from the National Science Foundation (SES 0924210), we conducted a series of interactive and interdisciplinary workshops in southern (Milola) and northern (Naitolia) Tanzania in 2010. The purpose of these workshops was to help local villagers to identify and select effective and, importantly, culturally appropriate water purification systems for use at the individual and household level. To do so, we developed a decision support framework that merged concepts from good practice in structured decision making, risk communication, public health, water quality testing, and -- as a matter of necessity -- popular television cooking shows.
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