Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

permaculture - [permaculture] Out of Poverty: Design for the Other 90% ?

permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: permaculture

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Jim <ashevillecurrencyproject@gmail.com>
  • To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [permaculture] Out of Poverty: Design for the Other 90% ?
  • Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2008 13:29:44 -0500

Hi-
Has anyone heard about this book, one way or the other, by this
Sebastapol-based author? I find this quote intriguing:
"I believe that nothing less than revolutions in water, agriculture,
markets, and design are needed. All four are doable and practical,
and I'm committed to making them happen before I die. "

If you respond to this post, please consider snipping out the part
below. I think it's perfectly fine to post long things on this list,
but when folks have to scroll through long responses that include
the long original, it gets to be a bit of scrolling work.
-- Jim Barton
PO Box 6821
West Asheville, NC 28816
(828) 318-7418

*March 5 - * /Out of Poverty: Design for the Other 90%/ A
presentation and discussion with Paul Polak. Old Main
Chapel, 6:00pm.

In a hard-hitting new book, Paul Polak tells why traditional
poverty eradication programs have fallen so short, and how
he and his organization developed an alternative approach
that has succeeded in lifting 17 million people out of
poverty. Polak's and IDE's achievements have been recognized
the Scientific American Top Fifty award for agriculture
policy (2003), the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year
award (2004), and the Tech Museum award for the design of
IDE's low-cost drip irrigation system (2004). Articles about
IDE and Polak have appeared in National Geographic, Harpers,
Forbes, and Scientific American. Polak gives frequent talks
and presentations at leading universities, as well as
academic and professional conferences like the 2006
International Symposium on Groundwater Sustainability
(ISGWAS), the Annual Meeting of the National Collegiate
Innovators and Inventors Association (NCIIA), the 2006 Aspen
Design Summit, and the 2007 Pop!Tech Conference. To learn
more about Paul and his work at IDE, please visit
http://www.ide-international.org.


*http://www.amazon.com/Out-Poverty-Traditional-Approaches-Currents/dp/1576754499/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1202926684&sr=8-1

<http://www.amazon.com/Out-Poverty-Traditional-Approaches-Currents/dp/1576754499/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1202926684&sr=8-1>
Book Description*
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.

*From the Publisher*
*Preface*

My fifteen-month-old grandson, Ethan, has fallen in love with a
neighbor's driveway. It sits two houses down from where he lives
in Sebastopol, California, and it seems to overflow with small,
multi - colored stones. He stops there when I take him for a
walk, and then he refuses to leave. He picks up a handful of
stones and inspects each one carefully. He places them one after
another in my hand, watching intently, and I give them back to
him one by one until his hand is full again. I don't know who
has given him the job of turning every little stone over and
over in his hand until he understands its very essence, but
that's the job he has accepted, and he's not leaving until it's
done. He plops down on his butt and cuffs the stones into a
pile, looks at me, and knocks it down and giggles. He can keep
this up for hours, and if I pick him up to take him home, he
cries. His playful curiosity is infectious, and I think I must
have inherited a lot of genes from Ethan, because I operate just
as he does. I live to play and to satisfy my curiosity.

For the past twenty-five years, two questions have kept my
curiosity aroused: What makes poor people poor? And what can
they do about their poverty?

Because of these infernal questions, I've dozed off during
hundreds of long jeep rides with good companions over dusty,
potholed roads. I've had thousands of conversations with
one-acre farmers with dirt on their hands. We've walked along
their patches of ten-foot-high black pepper vines in the central
hills of Vietnam beside jungle permanently scarred by Agent
Orange. We've strolled together through their scattered
quarter-acre plots in the drab brown winter plains of the
Gangetic delta in Uttar Pradesh, and they have offered me more
cups of steaming tea than my seventy-three-year-old kidneys can
take. I love discovering new things from people nobody else ever
seems to listen to, and I love talking them into trying out some
of the crazy ideas that we come up with together. I have learned
more from talking with these poor farmers than from any other
thing I have done in my life.

This book will tell their story and describe some of the things
these people have taught me. It will tell the story of Krishna
Bahadur Thapa and his family, and of how they moved from barely
surviving on less than a dollar a day to earning forty-eight
hundred dollars a year from their two-acre farm in the hills of
Nepal. I tell many stories like Baha - dur's in this book, and I
hope that each one of them satisfies another small bit of your
curiosity about how people who are extremely poor live their
lives and dream their dreams. Best of all, what I learned from
these people has been put to work in straightforward strategies
that millions of other poor people have used to end their
poverty forever.

Each of the practical solutions to poverty I describe is obvious
and direct. For example, since 800 million of the people whose
families survive on less than a dollar a day earn their living
from small farms, why not start by looking for ways they can
make more money from farming? And since these farmers work for
less than a dollar a day, why not look for ways they can take
advantage of their remarkably low labor rates by growing
high-value, labor-intensive cash crops and selling them at the
time of year when these crops will fetch the highest prices? If
it is true that common sense is not really common, and that
seeing and doing the obvious are even less so, then some of the
conclusions I draw from my conversations with poor people will
surprise you: they certainly fly in the face of conventional
theory and practice in the development field.

I hate books about poverty that make you feel guilty, as well as
dry, academic ones that put you to sleep. Working to alleviate
poverty is a lively, exciting field capable of generating new
hope and inspiration, not feelings of gloom and doom. Learning
the truth about poverty generates disruptive innovations capable
of enriching the lives of rich people even more than those of
poor people.

The first section of the book explains how I became curious
about poverty, describes the process I learned for finding
creative solutions to just about any major social problem, and
challenges the three great poverty eradication myths that have
inhibited doing the obvious to end poverty.

The next section, Chapters 3 to 8, describes what many
small-acreage farmers have taught me, a practical approach
capable of ending the poverty of some 800 million of the world's
dollar-a-day people. For poor people themselves, there is little
doubt that the single most important step they can take to move
out of poverty is to learn how to make more money. The way to do
it is through grassroots enterprises --just about all of the
poor are already tough, stubborn, survival entrepreneurs--and
they have to find ways to make their enterprises more
profitable. For small-farm enterprises, the path to new wealth
lies in growing market-centered, high-value, labor-intensive
cash crops. To accomplish this, poor farmers need access to
affordable irrigation, a new generation of farming methods and
inputs customized to fit tiny farms, the creation of vibrant new
markets that bring them the seeds and fertilizers they need, and
open access to markets where small acreage farmers can sell
their products at a profit. This range of new products and
services for poor customers can only be created by a revolution
in current design practice, based on the ruthless pursuit of
affordability. Chapter 9 describes how the principles discussed
in the earlier chapters can be applied to helping poor people
living in urban slums and on the sidewalks of cities in
developing countries.

In the wrap-up section, Chapter 10 describes the central role
poverty plays in most of the problems facing planet Earth;
Chapter 11 describes what donors, governments, universities,
research institutions, and the rest of us can do to end poverty;
and Chapter 12 tells how Bahadur and his family finally moved
out of poverty.

My hope is that you will come away from reading this book
energized and inspired. There is much to be done.
**********************************************
*How do we change how the world thinks and acts about
dollar-a-day poverty?*,

January 30, 2008
By Karin Hibma
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A2ZSIAOVRG9H1T/ref=cm_cr_dp_pdp>
- See all my reviews

<http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A2ZSIAOVRG9H1T/ref=cm_cr_dp_auth_rev?ie=UTF8&sort%5Fby=MostRecentReview>
(REAL NAME)

<http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=cm_rn_bdg_help?ie=UTF8&nodeId=14279681&pop-up=1#RN>

In July 2005, we met Dr. Paul Polak at the first Aspen
Leadership Summit and began to understand his insights and work
of twenty-five years. He described "The Four Revolutions Needed
to End Poverty" in a way that inspired us as designers and
problem-solvers:

"I believe that nothing less than revolutions in water,
agriculture, markets, and design are needed. All four are doable
and practical, and I'm committed to making them happen before I
die.

How do we change how the world thinks and acts about
dollar-a-day poverty? I want to make three things happen:

Change the way design is taught in the west.

Change the way design is taught in developing countries.

Create a platform for 10,000 of the world's best designers to
address the practical problems of the other 90% of the world's
customers."

This delightful book is the beginning of finding ways for
everyone to jump in as major players, in a way that fits with
their dreams. It's an education, an insightful and inspiring
process and a great opportunity for us all.






Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page