Paul Polak founded IDE, International Development Enterprises, as a non-profit dedicated to eradicating poverty twenty-five years ago. Yet unlike many similar organizations, it tries to accomplish its goal through a very different approach to helping lift people out of poverty. There are over one billion people in the world who live on $1 a day, many of whom are farmers, growing commodity crops like rice for their own consumption. Polak argues that the only sustainable way to improve their lives is to nurture their inherent entrepreneurial spirit and allow them to make and sell high value products or offer services from which the income can be invested allowing an individual or families to prosper on an ongoing basis. 

Polak cites three poverty eradication myths that he believes perpetuate the problem.

1. Donations will help end poverty. Polak feels that simply giving money to people will not solve the problem on a long-term basis. The idea of “Give a man a fish and feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for life,” illustrates this well.
2. Big business will end poverty. This is not the case because big business does not see the “$1 a day person” as their customer. However, Polak makes a compelling argument that given the right products priced appropriately, the $1 a day consumer makes a very compelling market.
3. Governments that receive international aid will end poverty. This simply hasn’t worked, as decades of international aid donations for hundreds of billions of dollars has not made a significant difference worldwide to the number of people living in poverty.

Polak’s belief is that these entrepreneurs can help themselves move out of poverty by changing their agricultural practices. He argues that the path out of poverty is one that needs to be sustainable and that sustainability will come from transitioning current ideas about farming to ones that offer the farmer the ability to offer higher value, differentiated items. To do so, they need access to cheap irrigation, seeds, fertilizer, and markets.

In addition, he firmly believes that these entrepreneurs represent a huge, untapped market for goods that will improve their lives as long as the items they purchase are designed to withstand the rugged environments where they will be used, priced aggressively enough so that they can be purchased, and that those items will be used to help the entrepreneur generate additional income.

Calling it “Design for the Other 90%,” IDE has pioneered extremely low cost but reliable products that allow those living on $1 a day to help change their lives. Two of those examples are a treadle pump for getting water out of the ground for both irrigation and drinking and a donkey cart used for hauling. The total cost for the treadle pump is $25, and to date almost 2.5 million have been purchased and installed. The water creates more effective irrigation of land, allowing farmers to grow crops that have a higher value in the market, thus generating more income. 

The donkey cart was designed and sold in Somalia refugee camps in the 1980s. The first donkey cart cost $450 dollars and was paid for on credit. But its owner immediately was generating $200/month in new income from hauling goods, so the cart paid for itself in less than three months. To put that in perspective, the $200 monthly income generated by the cart owner was almost 15 times that of other people in the camps.

Both the pump and the cart help fulfill Polak’s idea that farmers with access to irrigation to grow off-season, high value crops, and the ability to get those crops to markets will fundamentally change the nature of their entrepreneurial enterprise and allow them to lift themselves out of poverty through their own efforts. It is a compelling idea and story, and Paul Polak and IDE deserve both a wider audience and continued support.