Based on his 25 years of experience, Polak explodes what he calls the ‘Three Great Poverty Eradication Myths’: that we can donate people out of poverty, that national economic growth will end poverty, and that Big Business, operating as it does now, will end poverty. Polak shows that programs based on these ideas have utterly failed–in fact, in sub-Saharan Africa poverty rates have actually gone up. These failed top-down efforts contrast sharply with the grassroots approach Polak and IDE have championed: helping the dollar-a-day poor earn more money through their own efforts. Amazingly enough, unexploited market opportunities do exist for the desperately poor. Polak describes how he and others have identified these opportunities and have developed innovative, low-cost tools that have helped in lifting 17 million people out of poverty.
Over de auteur
Paul Polak is the founder of International Development Enterprises, which currently assists rural farmers in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Ethiopia, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Vietnam, Zambia and Zimbabwe. He is the recipient of the Scientific American Top Fifty award for agriculture policy and the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award. In 2007, IDE received a $13.4 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Polak currently heads D-Rev: Design for the Other 90%, which helps multinationals profitably develop affordable products to help the world’s poor.
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