Paul Polak – Base of the pyramid opportunity
Paul Polak–founder of Colorado-based non-profit International Development enterprises (IDE)—is dedicated to developing practical solutions that attack poverty at its roots.
For the past 25 years, Paul has worked with thousands of farmers in countries around the world—including Bangladesh, India, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Nepal, Vietnam, Zambia and Zimbabwe–to help design and produce low–cost, income–generating products that have already moved 17 million people out of poverty.
Before establishing IDE, Paul practiced psychiatry for 23 years in Colorado. To better understand the environments influencing his patients, Paul would visit their homes and workplaces. After a trip he made to Bangladesh, he was inspired to use the skills he had honed while working with homeless veterans and mentally ill patients in Denver to serve the 800 million people living on a dollar a day around the world. Employing the same tactics he pioneered as a psychiatrist, Paul spent time “walking with farmers through their one-acre farms and enjoying a cup of tea with their families, sitting on a stool in front of their thatched-roof mud–and–wattle homes.”
Posted in Steve
August 6th, 2009 at 12:31 am
Hey Steve, great post. Thank you!
FYI the paulpolak twitter account was hacked into and unable to be accessed again, hence the start of the outofpoverty twitter account.
Dad and I have been working with twitter for months to fix this, to no avail. In the meantime, best twitter account for Paul Polak really is outofpoverty.
Thanks again!