Author Paul Polak on Out of Poverty, What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail

Tuesday, March 4: 5:30 -  7:00 pm: CSU, Clark Building, Room A102

RSVP: http://biz.colostate.edu/ms/gsse/rsvp/polak.aspx  
 
Development guru Paul Polak will be speaking on his hard-hitting, new book “Out of Poverty, What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail” as part of the GSSE Sustainable Enterprise Speaker Series. Hear his indictment of traditional aid approaches and his suggestions for practical, bottom-up solutions to some of the world’s most daunting problems.

Join us for an invigorating lecture from one of the leading minds in sustainability!

About the Speaker:
Paul Polak — founder of Colorado-based non-profit International Development enterprises (IDE)— is dedicated to developing practical solutions that attack poverty at its roots. For the past 25 years, Paul has worked with thousands of farmers in countries around the world—including Bangladesh, India, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Nepal, Vietnam, Zambia and Zimbabwe—to help design and produce low-cost, income-generating products that have already moved 17 million people out of poverty.

Before establishing IDE, Paul practiced psychiatry for 23 years in Colorado. to better understand the environments influencing his patients, Paul would visit their homes and workplaces. After a trip he made to Bangladesh, he was inspired to use the skills he had honed while working with homeless veterans and mentally ill patients in Denver to serve the 800 million people living on a dollar a day around the world. Employing the same tactics he pioneered as a psychiatrist, Paul spent time  “walking with farmers through their one-acre farms and enjoying a cup of tea with their families, sitting on a stool in front of their thatched-roof mud-and-wattle homes.”

Paul’s ability to respond with innovative solutions—such as the $25 treadle pump and small farm drip-irrigation systems starting at $3—helped IDE increase poor farmers’ net income by  $288 million annually.   Last year, IDE received a $14 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation. In 2004, Paul received Ernst & Young’s “entrepreneur of the year” award in the social responsibility category. And, Paul was named one of the Scientific American “top 50” for his leadership in agriculture policy in 2003.

In spring 2007, the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York showcased Design for the Other 90%—an exhibition inspired by Paul—that features affordable and socially responsible objects, including several IDE water irrigation and storage tools. Paul poses the same challenge in Out of Poverty that the exhibition addresses: 90 percent of the world’s designers focus on solutions for the richest 10 percent of the world’s customers rather than the other 90 percent who need it most.