Paul’s approach to solving our world’s greatest ailment is one of simplicity in design and humanity in spirit. His powerful recipe for change is clear, precise and DO-able. And we need desperately to DO it right now.
— JOHN MAEDA
Associate Director of Research MIT Media Lab and author of The Laws of Simplicity
Practical things you can do
ONE: If you like what you’ve read in Out of Poverty, get ten other people to read it and encourage them to act on what they learn from it.
TWO: Stop pitying poor people.
THREE: Learn as much as you can about poor people in your neighborhood, their specific problems, and the specific context in which they
live and work.
FOUR: Become informed about the realities of global poverty and what can be done about it.
FIVE: Invest in viable businesses serving poor customers.
SIX: Contribute time and money to organizations that demonstrate specific scalable impacts, and make them accountable for whatever time or money you provide.
PAUL POLAK
Paul Polak–founder of Colorado-based non-profit
International Development enterprises (IDE)—is
dedicated to developing practical solutions that attack
poverty at its roots.
For the past 25 years, Paul has worked with thousands
of farmers in countries around the world—including
Bangladesh, India, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Nepal,
Vietnam, Zambia and Zimbabwe–to help design and
produce low–cost, income–generating products that
have already moved 17 million people out of poverty.
Before establishing IDE, Paul practiced psychiatry for 23 years in Colorado. To better understand the environments influencing his patients, Paul would visit their homes and workplaces. After a trip he made to Bangladesh, he was inspired to use the skills he had honed while working with homeless veterans and mentally ill patients in Denver to serve the 800 million people living on a dollar a day around the world. Employing the same tactics he pioneered as a psychiatrist, Paul spent time “walking with farmers through their one-acre farms and enjoying a cup of tea with their families, sitting on a stool in front of their thatched-roof mud–and–wattle homes.”
Paul’s ability to respond with innovative solutions–such as the $25 treadle pump and small farm drip–irrigation systems starting at $3—helped IDE increase poor farmers’ net income by $288 million annually.
IDE received a $14 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation in 2006. In 2004, Paul received Ernst & Young’s “Entrepreneur of the Year” award in the social responsibility category. And Paul was named one of the Scientific American “top 50” for his leadership in agriculture policy in 2003.
A MESSAGE FROM PAUL POLAK
I have been asked many times if the practical solutions to poverty outlined in this book can also be applied to poverty in the United States. Of course they can!
When I visited the San Luis Valley, the poorest rural area in Colorado, I learned that potatoes, one of the most economically important crops grown there, were trucked out of the San Luis Valley to Texas, where they were repackaged in five pound bags, trucked back to San Luis Valley grocery stores, and sold at a decent markup. But the potato products with the greatest markups were frozen packaged French fries and Curley fries, trucked back from Texas to San Luis Valley cafes and restaurants.
Why not form local rural enterprises that process local potatoes into frozen French fries and Curley fries and sell them to local restaurants? The savings in transport costs should more than make up for the “economies of scale” of bigger processing plants in Texas. And since a lot of Canola is also grown in San Luis valley, why not use low cost oil expellers to produce a locally branded form of Canola oil for local health food stores?
In one region of the Navajo Nation where the borders of Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico meet, I met a remarkable Navajo entrepreneur who works for the BIA and grows, processes and packages steamed corn and other corn products. He sells them to Navajo customers all over the United States. I met four or five other entrepreneurial Navajo farmers like him. Why couldn’t these successful Navajo entrepreneurs serve as role models for hundreds of Navajos using low-cost drip irrigation and intensive horticulture to create and market a variety of branded culturally important high-value agricultural products? And why couldn’t those of you interested in Native American culture help something like this come into being?
These are examples of some things you can do to help solve the problem of poverty at home. But as you’ve probably guessed by now, the problem-solving process I describe in Out of Poverty applies to many of the world’s most difficult social problems. Practical solutions for them lie in going to where the action is, listening to the people who have the problem and learning everything there is to know about the problem’s local context.