Commitment to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) relating to poverty reduction demands innovative responses from the engineering community. This paper outlines some of approaches to procurement and appropriate standards and technologies that have been developed in the provision of housing and infrastructure in the post apartheid South Africa. These approaches have provided opportunities to vulnerable and marginalised groups in order to address inequities within a society and in so doing address poverty. This has been accompanied by the development of national standards and best practices to replicate outcomes from pilot projects at scale. The lessons learned in South Africa are synthesised and contextualised within developing countries. This is done in terms of a ‘green’ (environmental) agenda and ‘brown’ (poverty and underdevelopment) agenda and available engineering capacity. The work in South Africa provides a platform for capacity building in developing countries and informs institutional responses to certain MDGs.