Out of Poverty

Out of Poverty

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.

Paul Polak, whose organisation International Development Enterprises (IDE) has directly helped over 17 million people get out of poverty permanently, exposes the top 3 things we are doing wrong in our efforts to end the root causes of poverty. He then, through the story of a Nepali farmer, goes on to detail solutions for what actually works in ending poverty.

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In 1939, on the eve of the holocaust, a young Paul Polak fled with his family from Czechoslovakia. When they eventually re-settled in Canada, Polak helped his family rebuild their life from the ground up. In 1981 he founded International Development Enterprises (IDE), the non-profit organisation he currently heads as president. Through his work with IDE, he has helped some 15 million impoverished farmers in developing countries to escape the cycle of subsistence poverty. IDE makes innovative, low-cost water-resource technologies accessible to the world s poorest farmers, enabling them to access and control water, increase and diversify agricultural production, create new wealth and improve their families quality of life. Prior to his work with IDE, Polak served as Executive Director and Founder of the Southwest Denver Community Mental Health Center (1971-1981) and as Chief of the Fort Logan Mental Health Center's Crisis Intervention Service (1967-1971). Polak received his M.D. from the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada in 1958, and his certification from the American Board of Neurology and Psychiatry in 1978.