Just a few years ago, the Sahel region at the northern edge of Senegal was a “barren wasteland” where nothing had grown for 40 years. But the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) and local villagers teamed up to regreen the area, bringing back agriculture, improving the economy of the people who live there, and preventing the climate migration that desertification ultimately leads to.
The difference in efficiency is so high, you could run through with the backhoe and then give locals the money anyway.
Something along the lines of “hiring heavy equipment, then buying a ticket to the gym, everytime you need this done because you never learned anything else”. My neighbours tell me I need heavy equipment to fell my forest, absolutely not, I’ll go on foot, respect and fell every single tree I plan to fell, leave no tracks, become stronger and wiser, all for free.
Heavy equipment is not cheap, too, especially if you need an operator with skill comparable with attention to small details that manual laborers have naturally. And it does not spread virally like skills. And it burns carbon and leaves tracks. It has its uses at scale, but not in pilots. Same thing everywhere: I have a pick-and-place robot to assemble my electronics, not even turning it on before I have at least 100-ish boards to assemble; it’s not expensive, it’s easier than manual labor - but you’ve got to know the system you build before giving it away to a machine, or you’ll have a long and expensive debug session ahead of you, even if you are certain know everything about it, which is totally not the case here.