Want to really help the world's poor?

If so, we need pay attention to Paul Polak, who really knows what he’s talking about. In 1987, Polak founded International Development Enterprises, an organization that since has helped 17 million get out of poverty. Now he has written a book entitled "Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail." In it, Polack convincingly shows that we can’t donate people out of poverty (often donations make matters worse), we can’t help the poor by attempting to raise the economic growth of their respective countries, and we can’t expect big business because they, too, don’t know how to effectively help.

Instead, Polack says, follow the 12 steps that have worked for millions of poor people. Some of his steps include the following: go to the poor people, listen to them, learn from them, and then teach them -- most of whom are farmers living on $1.00 a day -- how to turn what ever it is they do into profit making enterprises. His approach is grassroots, it’s bottom-up, it’s simple, it’s sensible, and it’s documented. In the book, you’ll follow the moving stories of people being helped, and in particular you’ll follow Krisha Bahadur Thapa, a barely surviving Nepali dollar-a-day farmer, as he moves up to a level of $4,800 a year...That’s upper-middle class in his area of Nepali.

Polak’s approach is very much like the old adage: “Give a hungry man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish and you feed him for life.” But Polak goes further; he teaches the hungry man how to turn fishing (or farming or what ever) into profit making. It’s this entrepreneurial approach, along with an accountability requirement, that makes the big difference in Polak’s programs. And now Polak also heads D-Rev: Design for the Other 90%, an organization with a sizable grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Through D-Rev he is bringing his entrepreneurial advice to multinationals, showing them how to profitably develop products that the world’s poor can afford.

Before giving money to any organization for the poor, Polack suggests getting ten people together to read, discuss, and learn from this book. He believes that his methods can even work for the poor just around the corner from where each of us live.

See Ode’s September 2007 article on Polak: www.odemagazine.com/doc/46/designing_a_better_world