Entrants's Name: Paul Polak

Country: United States

Field: Economic Development

Innovation - idea: 1.1 billion people worldwide survive on less than $1 a day, and 800 million of them earn their living from small farms. International Development Enterprises (IDE), the organization that I founded, has pioneered a unique approach to rural poverty alleviation that has enabled over 3 million dollar-a-day families to increase their net income by $250 a year on average. This approach is called PRISM.

Innovation - why it is pioneering: IDE sees poverty alleviation as a business and the poor as customers. PRISM evolved from talking to poor farmers and listening to their needs. It addresses two key constraints that rural families face: access to water and access to markets. PRISM works by connecting farmers to low-cost, productivity-enhancing water control technologies and enabling them to participate effectively in local markets.

Strategy - how it achieves impact: PRISM identifies market opportunities that are likely to offer the highest returns to small producers in each agro- economic zone, and effects market-based interventions that enable farmers to participate in these markets. Specifically, IDE designs appropriate, low-cost water control technologies tailored to the needs of poor customers, and establishes manufacturing and supply chains for these devices (such as treadle pumps, drip irrigation kits, and low-cost water storage systems). Using IDE’s technologies, farmers are able to increase and diversify production. At the same time IDE works to remove barriers to market access for small farmers. We help farmers maximize their comparative advantage in low labor costs by shifting from subsistence production to producing high- value, labor-intensive crops that are profitable in the local market. We provide training and business development services that enable farmers to turn their subsistence farms into sustainable micro-enterprises.

Strategy - growth plans: IDE’s vision is to improve, leverage, and scale up our learning and accomplishments to date to bring an additional 30 million families out of poverty and increase their income by approximately $15 billion by the year 2020. We recently embarked on a four-year project funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that will lay the groundwork for realizing this ambitious goal. IDE currently operates eight country programs in Asia and Africa: Bangladesh, Cambodia, Myanmar, Nepal, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Through collaboration and sharing among program countries, we continually seek to refine and document the PRISM methodology. In Ethiopia, our newest program country, we will be establishing a center for technology development and value-chain research that will further help to disseminate our work.

Impact to date: Since 1981 IDE has enabled over 3 million rural families to raise their net income by $250 a year on average. A good example of IDE’s impact is our pioneering treadle pump project in Bangladesh. In the mid-1980s, IDE began marketing this low-cost technology to poor Bangladeshi farmers. This human-powered pump allowed farmers to access groundwater for irrigation during the dry season, enabling them to grow additional crops and generate new income. By the time that IDE’s Bangladesh treadle pump project ended in 2003, over 1.5 million treadle pumps had been bought and installed by farmers. In Bangladesh today, tens of thousands of treadle pumps are sold annually through the private sector. IDE’s success sparked a new wave of interest in low-cost technologies for small plot agriculture. A number of other organizations, including Kickstart (formerly ApproTEC), EnterpriseWorks, and the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) now market versions of the treadle pump worldwide.

Future impact: IDE is a small organization with a huge vision. Our goal is to help 30 million families (150 million individuals) escape poverty by the year 2020. In the next ten years we will have laid a solid groundwork for this ambitious plan by scaling up existing efforts in all of our country programs. Given the impact that PRISM has already made in the lives of the rural poor, we are confident of the potential for scaling up this unique model. Interest in and support for our work is growing. For example, we are collaborating with leading American universities to bring the concept of affordable design for wealth creation to classrooms throughout the country, helping to nurture a whole new generation of social entrepreneurs capable of replicating IDE’s successes on an even greater scale.

Sustainability - resource base: IDE employs about 600 staff worldwide, 98% of them as field staff in IDE’s eight country programs. Because the vast majority of field staff are also host-country nationals, they are able to relate in a direct way with the poor farmers who are our customers. IDE’s projects are funded by a wide variety of public and private institutions, such as USAID, the government of the Netherlands, Oxfam UK, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In addition, IDE raises funds for general operations from individuals and private foundations.

Major challenge for the field: For the field of market-based solutions to poverty the major challenge is to continually innovate in response to the needs of poor customers, while also building the organizational capacity needed to attain scale. For IDE, this means partnering with a diverse range of organizations and institutions and constantly seeking out new ways to reach our target population.

Contact Information:

Name: Dr. Paul Polak - Founder
Mailing address: International Development Enterprises (IDE), 10403 W. Colfax Avenue, Suite 500, Lakewood, CO 80215
Country: United States
Email: lchang@ideorg.org
Tel: 303-232-4336
Fax: 303-232-8346
Website: www.ide-international.org

Bio: Paul Polak, a psychiatrist and entrepreneur, is the Founder of International Development Enterprises (IDE), an organization that has ended the poverty of more than 12 million dollar-a-day farmers by enabling them to access low-cost water resource technologies and participate effectively in markets. With IDE’s help, rural families typically increase their income by $250 a year. IDE and Dr. Polak’s work have been recognized by the Scientific American Top Fifty award for agriculture (2003), the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year award for the Rocky Mountain region (2004), and the Tech Museum award (2004). Articles about IDE and Dr. Polak have appeared in National Geographic, Harpers, Forbes, and Scientific American.