Joomla Software solutions Template

Today is dedicated to the bible of all social designers, Out of Poverty, from Paul Polak (Paul Polak, Out of Povery, What works when traditional approaches fail, Tata McGraw Hill Edition, 2008). The lattest is the founder of the biggest social design company in the world, IDEI! You find a bit between Prahalad and Karnani, want to come back to less theory and more action. This book should fit!

Just a first sentence before you all click on "read more" for the first series of bullet points about this wonderful book. I like the way he introduce simplicity and ground-based principles.And the proof that engineering is not exclusively for engineers (Paul Polas was psychiatrist before going to social design... special tribute to Thomas!)

"Poverty plays such a critical role in the incidence and prevalence of all forms of illness, I have always believed that learning about poverty and what can be done to end it should be a basic science in every medical school and psychiatric-training curriculum.". Read more by clicking on... read more!

First Point - The Polak interpretation of KISS (Keep it Simple, Stupid!)

The biggest reason most poor people are poor is because they don’t have enough money, most of the extremely poor people in the world earn their living from one-acre farms (80% of Inidan farms are smaller than five acres). They can earn much more money by finding ways to grow and sell high-value labor-intensive crops such as off-season fruits and vegetables.

And when Polak is speaking about poor, he means the billion leaving with less than $1 a day.

To do that, they need access to very cheap small-farm irrigation, good seeds and fertilizer, and markets where they can sell their crops at a profit. The remarkable thing is that poverty eradication programs continue to spend billions of dollars in poor countries, without much to show for it and without taking most of these points into account.

People are capable of moving out of poverty in a few months, because there are simple and obvious solutions to it.

Second point - Twelve Steps to Practical Problem Solving – Keep it simple, but also concrete, and ambitious!

1.       Go where the action is. Don’t stay in an office or far away from the ground. Paul Polak keep repeating all solutions he found came from his visits to 3 000 families of small farmers all over the world

2.       Talk to people who have the problem and listen to what they say (end user are usually excellent, rational decision makers)

3.       Learn everything you can about the problem’s specific context

4.       Think big and act big (meaning you think about the global market and how to reach him within 15 years)

5.       Think like a child

6.       See and do the obvious

7.       If somebody has already invented it, you don’t need to do so again

8.       Make sure your approach has positive measurable impacts that can be brought to scale. Make sure it can reach at least a million people and make their lives measurably better

9.       Design to specific cost and price targets

10.   Follow practical three-year plans (with not too ambitious neither too puny objectives. “Forget the 30 million families you will help in 10 years, focus on how you’ll serve the 100 000 first”)

11.   Continue to learn from your customers

12.   Stay positive: don’t be distracted by what other people think

Personal comment - It’s exactly the 12 advices you could, and that are actually given, to start ups when they bootstrap! Difference is that you rarely share the culture and habits of your market

Third point - You can’t fight poverty by donation, national economic growth or big business!

-          We can donate people out of poverty. Jeffrey Sachs and the UN Millenium Development Goals initiative are asking for $160 billion a year for ten years. “Here is what will really happen. Western “experts” with little or no exposure to the village will decide how to spend the money. As soon as word gets out that a multimillion-dollar giveaway is coming, developing-countries politicians with Swiss bank accounts and get-rich-businessmen will gather like moths around a flame. (…) For the first year or two, generously funded big projects will produce excellent results and will receive dramatic media coverage. But when the project money runs out, yields will drop back to normal.”

Example of issue with a grant: give a shallow tube well which irrigates 15 acres, where more than 50 families are living, instead of 4 to 5 acres, which would make distribution of water much simpler.

Another issue, from corporate: use world bank funding to promote a company product, top of the range. But the global demand for low-cost drip irrigation is far too big to provide these nice subsidies for everybody, so the people who get them are the ones with connections and bribes for government officials. .

Grants have two issues: it cannot cover the whole unmet needs and it doesn’t last enough time. Consequence is that it is generally given to those who need less.

Some area requires subsidies, such as education, roads, health and creation of new markets in poor rural areas. Palam is a small scale application of this principle.

-          National economic growth obviously is a condition but not alone to end poverty. It is economic growth in remote rural area on one-acre farms where poor people live that we need, not generic per capita GDP growth.

-          Multinationals know how to make money, but few know how to do with customers who survive on less than a dollar a day. Prahalad vision is exciting, but practical methods and examples given in Fortune at the bottom of the Pyramid are frustrating.