By Paul Polak
One of the things that always piqued my curiosity about poverty is that most people see it as more permanent than the Rock of Gibraltar. But I know that people are capable of moving out of poverty, because there are simple and obvious solutions to it. Anyone can come up with obvious practical solutions to just about any complicated social problem by following a few simple, basic steps.
Go to where the action is.
In 1981, when I was working on a project to build and sell 500 donkey carts to refugees in Somalia, I met a pleasant middle-aged man who managed five health clinics in refugee camps for a major international relief organization.
“How often do you get out to the refugee camps to visit your clinics?” I asked.
“I haven’t been there yet and I don’t plan to go soon,” he said with considerable pride. “If you go to the field, it’s mass confusion. Managers have to be able to think clearly, without distractions, to make good decisions, and you simply can’t do it in the middle of the noise and chaos of field conditions.”
I was so astonished that for once in my life I was speechless. I simply can’t imagine how anybody can make realistic plans to eradicate poverty or to address any important problem without visiting the places where the problem is occurring and talking with the people who have the problem.
Talk to the people who have the problem and listen to what they have to say.
In the 1990s, agriculture experts in Bangladesh were dismayed that small-acreage farmers were applying only a tiny fraction of the fertilizer that their rice crops needed, even though they could triple what they had invested in fertilizer from the increased rice yields. The experts complained about the irrational and superstitious behavior of small-acreage farmers, and set up extension programs and farmer-training programs. But the farmers continued to apply only a fraction of the fertilizer that their rice needed to thrive. Finally, somebody asked some farmers why they were using so little fertilizer.
“Oh, that’s easy,” they said. “Every 10 years or so, there is a major flood during the monsoon season that carries away all the fertilizer we apply. So we only apply the amount of fertilizer we can afford to lose in a 10-year flood.”
Suddenly it became clear that the farmers were excellent, rational decision makers and that it was the agriculture experts who had a lot to learn. With very good reason, subsistence farmers care much more about avoiding losing their farm than they do about tripling their income.
Learn everything you can about the problem’s specific context.
After a great deal of success in Bangladesh with one irrigation invention, the treadle pump, many people now ask me if they could use treadle pumps to help farmers in other countries. “How deep is the water table in your village?” I ask, because a treadle pump is a suction pump that simply won’t lift water more than about 27 feet.
“I don’t know” is the most common answer.
“Tie a rock on the end of a piece of string, go to the nearest well, and measure how deep the water table is,” I say. “Or go to the government ministry of water resources — they likely have maps with that kind of information.”
The fact is you can’t make practical plans unless you gather a lot of details about each specific village context. What kind of high-value crops you can grow in each depends on the type of soil and the climate. The price of fruits and vegetables is usually highest at the time of year when it’s most difficult to grow them, so it’s important to know why these crops are difficult to grow at that time of year and what can be done to overcome the difficulty.
Think big and act big.
If you learn about a problem in its real-life context from the people who have the problem, ask basic questions and open your eyes to see the obvious, you are likely to come up with big ideas with world-changing potential.
There are a billion people in the world who need eyeglasses but don’t have them. A potential solution is to provide access to display stands from which people could pick $2 spectacles that correct their vision problems. When most people think of implementing a solution like this, they think small. There are several organizations that have started to provide affordable reading glasses to poor people, but all of them together have delivered less than a half million eyeglasses, which serves less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the customers who need them. I start by thinking about how to reach half of the total potential market within 15 years. A business plan to accomplish this would probably need to reach global sales of $50 million a year within five years, purchasing 50-cent eyeglasses from mainland China a million or more at a time and selling them at a retail price of about $2. I would spend most of my time designing an effective global marketing-and-distribution plan for both rural and urban areas, and wrap it up with a clear statement of the start-up capital required to implement a three-year plan, how it would be spent, and what it would accomplish. This kind of planning is routine for large businesses or for any entrepreneur seeking start-up venture capital, but it is rare for development organizations.
Thinking big in this way always carries the risk that you will fail in a big way. But if you can’t stand to take the risk of failing and looking bad while doing so, you probably should be in a different line of work.
Think like a child.
There is a simple and direct curiosity in childhood and a love of play that we tend to miss badly in our approach to problem-solving as adults. If you think like a child, you can quickly strip a problem down to its basic elements.
In 1996 I was in Cachoeira, an Amazon rain-forest village, trying to figure out how rubbertappers could dry Brazil nuts at the village gathering point so they could increase their income. We had to design a village drier to replace the large industrial driers of big-city plants. When we walked through the villages, I saw that every second house had a forno de farinha, a two-foot-high baked-clay furnace with an eight-by-ten-foot stove top used to dry manioc flour. When I saw all these ovens used to dry manioc, I realized that each of them could also become a Brazil nut drier. We just needed to think like children instead of engineers.
So we built a removable wooden house with a chimney that sat on top of the manioc-drying oven, and used the heat coming from the stove top to draw air over the surface of Brazil nuts that were drying on wire-mesh drawers inside the wooden house. We built the first one from scratch in two hours.
See and do the obvious.
If we can’t see our blind spots, how can we begin to see and do the obvious?
It took me several years and several hundred interviews with poor families to begin to see this fact. Three-quarters of the dollar-a-day poverty in the world has its roots in tiny farms. Ninety-eight percent of all the farms in China, 96 percent of the farms in Bangladesh, 87 percent of the farms in Ethiopia and 80 percent of the farms in India are smaller than five acres. Eight hundred million of the people who earn less than a dollar a day scratch most of what they earn out of one-acre farms that are divided into four or five scattered quarter-acre plots. International Development Enterprises (IDE), the small organization I started, has been able to help 17 million people out of poverty because we realized that creating new wealth on one-acre farms depends on opening access to new forms of irrigation, agriculture, markets and design.
If somebody has already invented it, you don’t need to do so again.
People are often hesitant to use ideas from elsewhere. I have run into countless instances of the not-invented-here syndrome. Doing a quick search to see if somebody has already come up with an appropriate solution is always faster and easier than coming up with something new.
I was convinced that I had found a new way of delivering water cheaply, drop by drop, to plants by punching holes in plastic pipes and letting water slowly dribble out. Dan Spare, the first engineer I talked to about this great idea of mine, politely informed me that the Israelis had invented it 35 years earlier and that it was called “drip irrigation.” I had never heard of it.
Make sure your approach has positive, measurable impacts that can be brought to scale.
How many people can benefit from a development project if it proves to be successful? This is one of the first questions to be asked about any idea for a practical solution, since it takes a lot of time and money to implement a project. But often this question is never asked. For example, a few refugees in Somalia who lived in camps beside rivers and caught catfish to sell could broaden their markets by preserving the fish through salting and smoking, since refrigeration was unavailable. But all refugees needed affordable transport services, so picking between fish smokers and donkey carts was a no-brainer.
The only projects worth doing have measurable costs, impacts that are an improvement over their antecedents and the potential to be brought to scale.
Design to specific cost and price targets.
We ran across a team in Somalia that had organized a project to help refugee women make and sell soap. But when we asked how much it would cost to buy some of this soap, it was hard to get a clear answer. We eventually learned they could have bought the finest, most perfumed soaps available in Paris, air-freighted them to Somalia and sold them at a cheaper price than what it cost to produce the crude soap the refugees were making.
The key issue that prevented the team from implementing a cost-effective project was a lack of interest in figuring out the cost and price targets to be competitive in the local marketplace. Like so many other development organizations, they scorned materialistic measurements such as costs and profits, and had no measurements of impact other than their own belief that the group activity was good for refugee morale.
Follow practical three-year plans.
You may have a world-changing plan with a stunning vision for the future, but if you can’t come up with a specific plan for the next three-year period, you’ll never get anywhere. If your three-year targets are too ambitious, you will likely fail long before you have any chance of reaching your long-range vision. But if your three-year targets are too puny, you won’t lay a solid base for scaling up.
When I wrote a three-page concept note for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, I said that my long-term vision was to increase the net yearly income of 30 million families by $500 a year, and the foundation was satisfied. But when we started negotiating a specific initiative they could support, they said “Forget the 30 million — we want to see clear evidence over the next four years that you can reach 100,000. Prove to us that you can achieve the specific impacts that you say you can, and then we can consider going on to phase two and maybe even phase three.”
Continue to learn from your customers.
About ten years ago, the low-cost drip-irrigation technology we designed and field-tested in Nepal was ready for marketing. By this time we had a good sales force and several hundred hill farmers within 30 kilometers of Pokhara purchased low-cost drip systems. But sales didn’t go up at all in the second year. In fact, our field staff were dismayed to learn that many farmers who bought low-cost drip systems used only a quarter of the systems they purchased. When they interviewed the farmers who had bought drip systems, our field staff learned these farmers had no experience with the intensive horticulture required to grow off-season vegetables. In fact, there was a widely held belief that it was impossible to grow vegetables in winter in the Pokhara region.
Our field staff convinced me that we would never be able to sell low-cost drip systems until we trained farmers how to use these systems to grow off-season vegetables. We introduced field-based training programs in intensive horticulture, and sales took off quickly.
Stay positive: don’t be distracted by what other people think.
Twelve years ago I was championing two affordable irrigation technologies. The first was an animal-powered treadle pump, which produced as much water as a small diesel pump. A five-horsepower diesel pump cost $500 then, and I knew we could produce a bullock pump for $125, a pump that “burned” fodder instead of diesel. So I kept pressing until we had a marketable reliable bullock pump ready to go.
At the same time, I was convinced that a small-plot drip-irrigation system that could be bought at about a fifth of the price of conventional drip would command huge global demand. People told me if there really were a need for either system, the market would have introduced them long ago. But I was convinced that millions of small-acreage farmers could earn big money from these irrigation systems.
By the time the bullock pump was ready to sell, Chinese diesel pumps were available for $150 instead of $500, and the bullock pump was no longer cost-competitive. I had no regrets. We had good reasons to develop the bullock pump, and so we simply put the product on a back burner. The global market for low-cost drip irrigation, however, looks to be huge. I think at least 10 million poor families will buy a system.
Most breakthrough solutions to important problems, such as Henry Ford’s $500 automobile and Jobs and Wosniak’s $2,000 computer, came about because one or two stubborn entrepreneurs saw new solutions to old problems and persisted until their dream became a reality. Why should solving the problem of poverty be any different?
Paul Polak is co-founder and president of International Development Enterprises, a nonprofit dedicated to ending poverty by helping poor farmers invest in their own success. He is also the inventor of, among other things, the treadle pump. Polak has a new book, Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail, out this month from Berrett-Koehler Publishers (www.outofpoverty.info)
