Simple Solutions to World Poverty

New West Boulder: Simple Solutions to World Poverty

Twenty years ago, while working at a mental health clinic in Denver, psychiatrist Paul Polak asked himself a question that has crossed the mind of most of us at one point or another: Why are the poor so poor?

Unlike most of us, who answer that question with a shrug and a fatalistic “The poor are always with us.” Polak decided, first of all, to seek a more useful answer, and second, to do something to change the situation.

His answer might seem obvious: The poor have no way of making a living. The solution was equally simple: give them a way to make money by selling their crops (three-quarters of the world’s 1.1 billion people living in abject poverty are small-scale farmers). The result is the Lakewood-based organization International Development Enterprises, now in its 25th year of providing rural farmers with affordable irrigation technologies and access to markets. …