Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail (BK Currents)

By Paul Polak

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1605092762
• ISBN13: 9781605092768
• Release Date: September 2009
• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Length: 232 Pages
• Weight: 0.74 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.6" x 8.1"