Out of Poverty-the old fashioned way

Last fall, I was told about a guy named Paul Polak. "Never heard of em" , I said. I was talking with another ministry explaining the ideas and the method I was thinking about to reduce poverty in rural areas, it was then I was told of the book 'Out of Poverty'.

I returned home and I Googled it, and ordered the book on Amazon right away. That book radically changed my thinking and it confirmed some thoughts and ideas that had been rattling around in my cranium for some time.
What the book did for me is to realize, that if I were to dedicate the rest of my life to working with the rural poor, the approach should be the old fashioned way, work for it.

While traveling in West Africa last month, I witnessed many NGO's that I would imagine are getting thousands and if not millions of dollars and Euros to eradicate poverty. What kind of impact are they having? I would imagine some. But is it the long range solution?

The point of this post is using grass roots approach to reduce poverty.(I won't use the word 'eradicate' on this blog, Jesus said the poor will always be among you) There are 800 million small subsistence farmers in the world and they tend to be overlooked for many reasons.

But Paul Polak, the founder of International Development Enterprises (IDE) has proven methods that they share with others in reaching the rural poor. I hope that we can incorporate these into our ministry.

(From his website)
Paul Polak is drawing on his 25 years of experience, Polak explodes what he calls the "Three Great Poverty Eradication Myths": that donations alone will end 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 some areas where these approaches have been tried, such as sub-Saharan Africa, poverty rates have actually gone up.

These failed top-down efforts contrast sharply with the grassroots approach Polak and 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 impoverished rural farmers use the market to improve their lives.

Good stuff...stay tuned for more developments...