BuzzFlash Reviews

BUZZFLASH REVIEWS

I finished Paul Polak’s book "Out of Poverty" two months ago. During the time I was reading it, it had such an explosive impact on me I had to talk about Polak and his work with everybody I met. I was blown away by Polak’s entire social enterprise – the way he and his colleagues carefully consult with the people they are serving as well as with experts to create extremely simple cost effective tools and methods that will help farmers who earn a dollar a day.

The previous book that had a similar effect on me was Mohammed Yunnus’ A World Without Poverty (also available on BuzzFlash).

Most of Polak’s efforts to help poor people in the past 25 years have been focused on farmers in third world countries like Zambia and Bangladesh who live on one dollar a day. One of the Americans who taught Polak, the Canadian psychiatrist, about poverty long before his days as a social entrepreneur was a homeless man named Joe. Polak spent several hours in Joe’s cave-like space under a loading dock in Denver and listened and learned.

Polak is astute in realizing that not all people who talk to poor people are capable of gleaning the lessons that he has taken from his exchanges. I was struck by the respect and openness with which Polak treats people. He has been such a successful social entrepreneur because he clearly approaches each new situation without preconceived ideas so that workable inventions can come out of the particulars of the situation. He also gets people to show him what they’re currently doing so he is actively observing as he listens and learns.

Polak is Canadian whose father was a Czech Jew who had the prescience to escape the Nazis before it was too late when many relatives and friends questioned leaving because, among other things, they didn’t know what to do with their furniture.

Polak offers guidelines to anybody seriously interested in helping people help themselves get out of poverty. His guidelines sometimes seem like mantras because they are often repeated but I found the repetition helpful because they are crystallizations of hard won lessons as a result of many years of experience.

Certain lessons are a given for anybody working with people: asking people about their daily actions and needs and then listening.

Other guidelines for people developing products designed to help people get out of such as affordability, breaking even in the first year and expandability are demonstrated over and over again in the IDE ventures for which Polak was responsible such as the reduced power sprinkler and the treadle pump. As a result, I could see these guidelines embodied in the products they developed.

This is a great book to get insight into how the majority of the world lives and how we might go about making changes here in the United States and abroad.

by Terry Soto, BuzzFlash.com

From the publisher:

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.



BUZZFLASH REVIEWS