Author │ Human Rights Advocate│ Social Entrepreneur"If we learn to listen to poor people, understand the specific contexts in which they live and operate, and find ways to harness their entrepreneurial energy to increase their income, I have no doubt that at least 500 million families now surviving on less than a dollar a day will find practical ways to end their poverty within one generation."
--Dr. Paul Polak
Dr. Paul Polak, foun
der of the Colorado-based non-profit International Development Enterprises (IDE) and author of
Out of Poverty, is dedicated to developing practical solutions that attack poverty at its roots. For the past 25 years, Dr. Polak has worked with thousands of farmers in countries around the world to help design and produce low-cost, income-generating products that have already moved 17 million people out of poverty.
"I thought American water wizard Paul Polak was half-mad when I was chasing him around the Zambian countryside as he tried to bring cheap irrigation systems to small farmers. But Polak is an admirable character, and it was good fun trailing behind this dynamo. On the Kefue River he brought his road show to an impoverished village. Hundreds of people gathered as Polak demonstrated how a treadle pump—a cheap, foot-operated water pump—could irrigate their fields. As I and younger members of his staff wilted and headed for shade, Polak—drenched in sweat—continued to charge around, persuading villagers that small things like a pump could change their lives."
—Fen Montaigne,
National Geographic writer (after spending a week with Polak in Zambia)
Dr. Polak travels around the world to talk with farmer after farmer, learning in meticulous detail how they live their lives, dream their dreams, earn their incomes, and what they think could bring them out of poverty.
Out of Poverty is based on Dr. Polak’s extended conversations with more than three thousand small acreage farmers in developing countries. What he learned from these remarkable, stubborn survival entrepreneurs became the simple operating principles of IDE, which continues to help people who survive on less than a dollar a day move out of poverty.
Dr. Polak has written more than a hundred articles on water,
agriculture, design, and development, as well as papers in the field of mental health. He has been the subject of articles in
National Geographic,
Scientific American, Forbes, Harpers, The New York Times, and the
Wall Street Journal.
About International Development EnterprisesIDE started twenty-five years ago when three concerned individuals agreed to put up ten thousand dollars each to get it going. Art DeFehr was running Palliser Furniture, a family business which quickly grew into the biggest furniture company in Canada. Don Hedrick ran a supermarket and shopping center in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Dr. Paul Polak worked as a psychiatrist and in his spare time as an entrepreneur. From its first project, which built and sold five hundred donkey carts to refugee entrepreneurs in Somalia, to its present focus on intensive profitable agriculture on small farms, IDE’s mission has been to use practical business strategies to increase the incomes of the poor.
"In the beginning, I worked out of a bedroom in my house as the only staff member, and I worked for the first seven years as a volunteer, living from the money I made as an entrepreneur in other enterprises. Our first grant funds came from the government of Canada and the UN for the donkey cart project, and then we got another grant from the Canadian government to sell treadle pumps in Bangladesh and other countries, a project that turned into a big winner. Even at this early point twenty-two years ago, we sold the treadle pump at a fair market price, and as in the donkey cart project, the poor people who invested got three times their money back in the first year."
—Paul Polak
IDE has more than 500 full-time staff members who hail from the nine countries where they directly implement their projects—Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Ethiopia. IDE has had an impact on the lives of 3.5 million dollar-a-day small-farm families (17.5 million individuals) since its inception, and is working with its partners to reach 30 million families by 2020. IDE achieves results in challenging environments of extreme poverty, poor infrastructure, disease, and war. With 90 percent of its employees locally employed in these countries, IDE uses the entrepreneurial approach described in
Out of Poverty to succeed where traditional development models have failed.
Currently, Dr. Polak is spearheading D-Rev: Design for the Other 90% with the intent of igniting a design revolution in the way products are designed, marketed and distributed to enable new sources of income for the impoverished people who represent 90% of the world’s population. D-REV is an non-profit organization that invents and develops products and services that are reliable, cost-effective and affordable, providing simple, scalable and sustainable solutions to many areas of concern to the poor, such as healthcare and energy.
Selected Awards- 2004 Ernst & Young’s “Entrepreneur of the Year”
- 2004 Tech Museum Prize for design of IDE’s low-cost drip irrigation system
- 2003 Scientific American “Top 50” for his leadership in agriculture policy
Books
Out of Poverty (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2009)
Media