Simple Solutions to World Poverty

from The New West

By Richard Martin, 2-27-07

Twenty years ago, while working at a mental health clinic in Denver, psychiatrist Paul Polak asked himself a question that has crossed the mind of most of us at one point or another: Why are the poor so poor?

Unlike most of us, who answer that question with a shrug and a fatalistic “The poor are always with us.” Polak decided, first of all, to seek a more useful answer, and second, to do something to change the situation.

His answer might seem obvious: The poor have no way of making a living. The solution was equally simple: give them a way to make money by selling their crops (three-quarters of the world’s 1.1 billion people living in abject poverty are small-scale farmers). The result is the Lakewood-based organization International Development Enterprises, now in its 25th year of providing rural farmers with affordable irrigation technologies and access to markets.

Last week the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation recognized IDE’s work with a $13.4 million grant to boost its development of low-cost irrigation methods for rural farmers in the Third World. The grant, the largest in IDE’s history, “will allow us to take our approach a step further by creating the very best and lowest cost irrigation systems and making them available to people who need them most,” Polak said.

IDE is among the largest of the Boulder-Denver area’s NGOs, with almost 700 full-time staffers based in Bangladesh, Vietnam, Zimbabwe, and six other countries where some of the poorest people in the world live.

Polak, who escaped Czechoslovakia in 1939 with his family as a small boy and emigrated to Canada, anticipated the primary trend in philanthropy and Third World development by bringing the skills of his primary profession, psychiatry, and his business acumen to the work of helping the poorest climb out of destitution. One of his slogans is, “We treat poverty alleviation as a business,” and IDE specifically avoids giving away food and money.

“We treat the poor as customers,” says Zenia Tata, IDE’s executive director. “We do not believe that handouts work—we believe in the entrepreneurial spirit of the poor.”

One of the organization’s primary achievements is to develop and disseminate affordable, low-tech ways to water their fields, specifically the “Easy Drip” irrigation system and a human-powered treadle pump. Resembling a health-club Stairmaster, the pump has two pedals (made of locally available materials—bamboo, metal, or plastic) that work a pair of pistons that in turn creates lift in a tube well to bring water to the surface. The pump costs less than $50 in the countries where IDE is active.

In Myanmar, for example, IDE sells treadle pumps for $17. Tata says a group of grad students at Stanford is working to design a $5 version.

Because for the world’s truly poor (defined as people who live on the equivalent of less than a dollar a day), even $17 is a huge sum, IDE also works to provide micro-finance to “smallholders,” as the rural farmers are known. And because these farmers have seldom had excess produce to sell, IDE works to locate and provide access to markets where the farmers can make a profit.

What happens when we go into an area is we do an extensive study to determine where the local markets are and what they will bear in terms of local produce,” Tata explains. “In Asia, which is densely populated, there are lots of local markets; Africa is sparsely populated, so there’s more of a problem in getting to market.”

To meet that challenge in Africa, IDE has worked to connect local growers with supermarket chains and with the tourism industry, to provide First-World travelers with locally grown food. In all, IDE has improved the lives of 17 million people and created more than 10,000 micro enterprises—including 9000 or so local entrepreneurs who sell treadle pumps and other irrigation devices.

Simple solutions to a vastly complicated problem. That’s what the Gates Foundation has recognized in rewarding the work of IDE. And it’s what how all of us should be thinking as we face the looming challenges of the 21st century.