This Octogenarian Still Innovates To End Extreme Poverty
This post was originally produced for Forbes.
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Dr. Paul Polak, 85, is working with the zeal and enthusiasm of a freshly-minted college graduate, but he combines his passion with decades of experience to create outcomes at scale.
Polak’s first success was in delivering treadle pumps to farmers in India. Tens of millions of people have used the devices in the 30+ years since he organized a distribution channel around walk-up outdoor movies—think drive-in movies without cars.
At a time when most poor Indians did not have televisions at home, an opportunity to watch a film in the evening was quite a novelty. The plot of the film revolved around a father seeking to come up with the dowry for his daughter to marry. It only became possible after he purchased a treadle pump to irrigate his tiny farm.
Following the film, the treadle pumps sold like popcorn at a movie theater.
A typical treadle pump in use. CREDIT: PAUL POLAK
The experience taught Polak that successful innovation requires not just a better mousetrap but also a better distribution system.
Today, Polak is working on three new innovations.
Windhorse International/Spring Health India delivers affordable, safe drinking water every day to 150,000 customers in 262 villages in Orissa, India. That is Polak’s idea of pilot scale. He’s hoping to grow that by almost three orders of magnitude. His goal is always to reach 100 million people in extreme poverty.
Affordable Village Solar/SunWater India, is developing solar, rural electricity in Bihar, India. The project shows promise for increasing both food production and income. At this point, he is looking for a grant to get the project ready for commercialization.
Paul Polak CREDIT: PAUL POLAK
Transform Energy, his third venture, is the focus of the conversation Polak and I recorded and that you can watch in the video player at the top of this article. The concept of this venture is to help India farmers grow mesquite trees to fuel coal-fired power plants. Burning wood instead of coal does not increase carbon any more than solar does if trees are replaced.
The model that Polak is currently testing at a micro scale is to convert the mesquite to something closer to charcoal through torrefaction, by heating the mesquite chips in a kiln (the test kiln is a 55-gallon drum). By controlling the amount of oxygen in the kiln, combustion is prevented, and the wood is converted to a fuel that sufficiently resembles coal to be burned in its place.
The mesquite trees, when raised for this purpose, should sequester more carbon than is emitted when the wood is converted and then burned. The trees don’t die when harvested. After being harvested, the still living trunk will sprout again and keep some carbon in the root system even as it continues to collect more carbon as the new sprout grows, removing from the air the carbon produced when the pellets are burned.
The process was developed by volunteers from Ball Aerospace in Boulder. If it works, it could provide a new source of income for families living in extreme poverty in India even as it provides a renewable alternative to coal—on which India remains dependent.
Stephan Reckie, founding managing member for Angelus Funding, says the model works to mitigate climate change “uniquely and amazingly well.” He adds, “It also addresses rural poverty by providing jobs and entrepreneurial power to the workers that are running the distributed torrefaction plants.”
Reckie is such a fan that he joined the Transform Energy board.
Polak identifies a series of milestones for scaling Transform Energy:
Creating a twelve-barrel kiln that works
Testing the kiln and the growing process at three sites in Gujarat, India
Proving commercial viability
Attracting capital necessary to scale the business
Polak, who authored one of the definitive books on social entrepreneurship, The Business Solution to Poverty, with Mal Warwick, has a process for learning from people experiencing extreme poverty in the field.
He starts with an eight-hour interview with a family in their home. “I’ll ask them what they had for breakfast what they feed their dog, how far the kids go to school.” His goal is to establish a genuine rapport.
He drinks tea with them. “I have to take a pee somehow and find a way of doing that.” This allows him both to drink more tea and to get a clearer view of their lifestyle.
After completing the long interview with one family, he’ll interview six or seven others for an hour or two. It takes about five days. “I’ve never gone through that process without stumbling upon at least one transformative idea.”
After decades of developing social ventures, writing books and innovating, Polak remains as eager to hit on the next big idea for ending poverty as he ever has been.
A Chinese proverb says, “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now.”
The best time for an 85-year-old social entrepreneur to start a new business that may take decades to reach the targeted 100 million people was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now.
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