Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
""Out of Poverty by Paul Polak, offers optimism. Optimism not just for those fighting poverty and those fighting to get out of it, but for any company interested in a basically untapped 1 billion-person market."" -- Jessie Scanlon ""February 22, 2008; BusinessWeek""
Synopsis
In this impassioned and iconoclastic book Paul Polak, entrepreneur, inventor, and "pioneer of pro-poor technologies" (CNN.com) tells why mainstream poverty eradication programs have fallen so sadly short and how he and the organization he founded, International Development Enterprises, developed an approach that has already succeeded in lifting 17 million people out of poverty.
Drawing on his more than twenty-five years of experience, Polak explodes what he calls the "Three Great Poverty Eradication Myths" and lays out an alternative: providing the dollar-a-day poor with innovative, low-cost tools that allow them to use the market to improve their lives. Polak tells fascinating and moving stories about the people he and IDE have helped, especially Krishna Bahadur Thapa, a Nepali farmer who went from barely surviving to becoming solidly upper middle class. Out of Poverty offers a new and promising way to end world poverty, one that honors the entrepreneurial spirit of the poor themselves.
Synopsis
Futurists agree that poverty eradication is critical to the survival of the planet. Polak exposes the top three things people are doing wrong in their efforts to end the root causes of poverty and what they can do to make a positive impact.