Paul Polak signs his book for students; Charlie talks with Jim Taylor, the Director of IDE-Myanmar
Heather and I had the pleasure to see Paul Polak speak at Stanford University – he and his effort have been one of our role models, because of his experience and bottom up approach, and the way he helps local people identify what they value enough to often save money for. He is particularly interested in the poorest one billion people (<$USD 1/day), especially farmers, with a philosophy that if you can increase income then people themselves know how to make their lives better. He used examples from around the world on how he has found opportunities to work with people on generating more cash flow – I have also seen that people don’t always see ways that we may find obvious for being efficient, since their culture may have no experience (I call this “technology transfer” – moving key appropriate and low tech concepts around the world). Cabbage farming, diary/milk production, water storage, treadle water pumps, and all kinds of other things – he walks the talk! He has some good rules for what to do and what not to do – just summarized here:
- DO visit individual houses and talk for hours with real people about how they live, and what they think and know
- DO listen to them with all of your ability
- DO become an expert on what their issues are, and ask them enough hard questions
His larger list when you come into a new area is his “12 steps to practical problem solving” – buy his book! He also has his “don’t bother trilogy” – listen to 25 people for several hours each, make sure the return on investment is not more than one year (and 300% is better), and sell a million (for a profit – full market price and no subsidies).
Paul is pleasantly opinionated, and he does not pretend that his approach works for everything – but it does for plenty of things (including aspects of hunger and education, as Maslow points out, people will not advance their lives like they want unless they can first feed their families, then plan for the next generation to have more choices). Other models for development include William Easterly’s (The White Man’s Burden), Jeffrey Sach’s (The End of Poverty), using animals to promote sustainable wealth (Heifer.org), and the Bottom of the Pyramid movement (BOP – NextBillion.net) – none are right or wrong for all circumstances, and there are a hundred other ones, so learn about as many as you can and then mix and match! But who can argue about all of us spending more time listening to the end customers, in their homes? Personally, I cook and build stoves in individual homes just a way to visit them for hours (I sharpen knives while talking – why else would they have me that long?) and learn about more than just cooking – what do they value?
