The Business Solution to Poverty
Designing Products and Services for Three Billion New Customers
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Right now the number of people living on $2 a day or less is more than the entire population of the world in 1950. These 2.7 billion people are not just the world’s greatest challenge—they represent an extraordinary market opportunity. By learning how to serve them ethically and effectively, businesses can earn handsome profits while helping to solve one of the world’s most intractable problems.
The key is what Paul Polak and Mal Warwick call Zero-Based Design: starting from scratch to create innovative products and services tailored for the very poor, armed with a thorough understanding of what they really want and need and driven by what they call “the ruthless pursuit of affordability.”Polak has been doing this work for years, and Warwick has extensive experience in both business and philanthropy. Together, they show how their design principles and vision can enable unapologetic capitalists to supply the very poor with clean drinking water, electricity, irrigation, housing, education, healthcare, and other necessities at a fraction of the usual cost and at profit margins attractive to investors.
Promising governmental and philanthropic efforts to end poverty have not reached scale because they lack the incentives of the market to attract massive resources. This book opens an extraordinary opportunity for nimble entrepreneurs, investors, and corporate executives that will result not only in vibrant, growing businesses but also a better life for the world’s poorest people.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This inspiring manifesto from Windhorse International CEO Polak (Out of Poverty) and entrepreneur Warwick (Fundraising When Money Is Tight) features a comprehensive roadmap for executives and entrepreneurs who wish to address the needs of the "bottom billions" who live on $2 a day or less: clean water, renewable energy, affordable housing, accessible health care and education, and jobs. As Polak and Warwick write, "The poor need to be viewed as consumers, not as objects of pity and recipients of charity." The authors grimly describe how micro-loan setups have failed, development money has been misused, and development work has been abandoned. Better to establish small-scale businesses, they argue but only if companies can make a major impact: "If you don't understand the problem you've set out to solve from your customers' perspective; if your product or service won't dramatically increase their income; and if you can't send 100 million of , don't bother." The authors' strategies include delivery to the last 500 feet (recruiting "local people at local wages in a sales and distribution network that can reach even the most isolated villages and homes") and "Zero-Based Design" (designing products from scratch "without preconceptions or existing models to guide you... operating in a way that's calculated to transform the lives of all your customers"). Companies have opportunities to produce and sell goods and services in the developing world that the developed world takes for granted: crop insurance, nutritious food, toilets, electricity, schools, and health services. This blueprint should be required reading, since, as Polak reminds readers, "We can't donate ourselves out of poverty."
