E/ME 105 Product Design for the Developing World, Engineers for a Sustainable World & the Caltech Y Social Activism Speaker Series present OUT OF POVERTY: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail PAUL POLAK Wednesday, May 14, 2008 12:00pm, Thomas Hall, room 206, Caltech * "Out of Poverty" book-signing after the event * ** Boxed lunch available for the first 40 attendees **

Paul Polak challenges us to launch a revolution in the way we in the West think about water, agriculture, markets and design. Innovative design and the ruthless pursuit of affordability, he argues, are key to long-term impacts on poverty and to eradicating it worldwide. Polak and his colleagues at IDE have interviewed 3,000 small farmers around the globe over the past 25 years to help develop small-scale innovations that have worked -- placing 750,000 acres of land under irrigation and proving that farmers in developing countries can generate wealth by focusing on high-value, labor-intensive cash crops.

In his book "Out of Poverty," Polak demonstrates that his approach -- helping small farmers increase their crop yield year-round with innovative, low-cost agricultural tools -- is an effective way for the 800 million people living on one-acre farms worldwide to move out of poverty. Challenging current conventional methods for alleviating poverty, Polak exposes the "three 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.

"While it certainly is true that powerlessness, poor health, poor education and absent transport infrastructure are important root causes of poverty," Polak says, "there can be no question that the most direct and cost-effective first step out of poverty is to find ways to help poor people to increase their income."

Paul Polak is the founder of International Development Enterprises (IDE) -- a global non-profit organization that has successfully helped 17 million people in developing countries escape poverty. So far, IDE has successfully developed and distributed 200,000 of the world’s first small farm drip-irrigation systems—costing farmers as little as $3 each, and 2 million $25 treadle pumps globally.