Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail

An "exciting" new approach to lifting people out of poverty that rejects the ineffective top-down mindset (Steve Wozniak, confounder of Apple Computer). Based on his twenty-five years of experience, Paul 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 his organization International Development Enterprises 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 seventeen million people out of poverty.…