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Ebook332 pages4 hours
Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail
By Paul Polak
Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars
2.5/5
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About this ebook
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.
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Reviews for Out of Poverty
Rating: 2.25 out of 5 stars
2.5/5
4 ratings1 review
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5“Out of Poverty” is a workshop; it’s an evangelical seminar and an infomercial. It’s subdivided ruthlessly. It’s full of lists. It’s incredibly repetitive. There is absolutely no way to read it at an academic remove because Paul Polak is beating his readers over the head with the urgent simplicity of his thinking and with the exasperation of a pragmatist who is regularly accused of idealism.Polak wants to encourage a modest paradigm shift in development. He’s convinced that donations will not alleviate poverty; that a country’s economic growth will not necessarily help the poor and that big businesses cannot be trusted to do so either. He champions design for the other 90%--the increasingly popular effort to engineer products for the billions of people making do with about $1 a day. And he is a powerful advocate of small-scale thinking: the one-acre farm is great: grow pumpkins on your roof and a raspberry patch! He wants to create wafer thin profit margins; but to spread those margins across a billion people. Why not?Polak is giving it away. “Out of Poverty” repeatedly challenges entrepreneurs to take his ideas and to profit by them. Why isn’t anyone making cheap eye glasses like he proposes? How about his treadle pumps and low-cost drip irrigation systems? Or his lockers for homeless people?He’s convincing. Whenever my own professional work overlaps with what he discusses, I’ll pick up his book and make sure I’m paying attention to his advice. Others in the development community will do their jobs better if they do the same—especially those people involved in agriculture and subsistence farming.And if you are far removed from the developing world and from development work in general, this is still a useful book for orienting yourself in such matters. Polak makes sure that his readers all know what he would like for them to do upon completing “Out of Poverty.” Such clarity of purpose makes for a rather graceless and pushy book; but the man’s got rock solid ideas.