Interview with Paul Polak - Founder of D-Rev - has helped 17 million out of Poverty!

Lynne Hazelden interviews an AMAZING man... whilst a psychiatrist, entrepreneur and philanthropist, Dr. Paul Polak is the founder of International Development Enterprises (IDE), a nonprofit that is harnessing the power of the market to alleviate poverty. Through IDE, he has helped over 17 million impoverished farmers in developing countries to escape the cycle of subsistence poverty. IDE makes innovative, low-cost water resource technologies accessible to the world's poorest farmers, enabling them to access and control water, increase and diversify agricultural production, create new wealth, and improve their families' quality of life. What makes Paul's work unique is the market-based approach that he brings to poverty alleviation-an approach based on his belief that the rural poor are natural entrepreneurs who, if given the opportunity, will invest their own limited resources to ensure their families' security and well-being. Paul's achievements have been recognized with the Scientific American Top Fifty award for agriculture policy (2003), the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year award (2004), and the Tech Museum award for the design of IDE's low-cost drip irrigation system (2004). Paul and his work have been profiled in National Geographic, Harpers, Forbes, and Scientific American. He presents at leading universities, as well as academic and professional conferences such as the 2006 International Symposium on Groundwater Sustainability (ISGWAS), the Annual Meeting of the National Collegiate Innovators and Inventors Association (NCIIA), the 2006 Aspen Design Summit, and the 2007 Pop!Tech Conference. Paul is the author of "Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail."