World Ark Magazine - March/April 2008 - (Page 15) simple, elegant solutions. Good design is not just about stylish furniture or sleek cars. At its best, good design can transform lives. The most successful designs for poor people, say people like Martin Fisher, are those that help them transform their own lives. Designing a Better Farm With these principles in mind, what is the best way to help the rural poor in their efforts to earn a living? Most of the rural poor with whom Polak and Fisher worked with were subsistence farmers (as are many of the world’s poor). Many of these farmers voiced their frustrations with the limitations of their farms. They often relied on irrigation by buckets and had no way to store water. Their growing season was confined to the rainy season, which limited marketability, as local markets were flooded with produce during those times. But with a low-cost, low-tech, year-round irrigation system, farmers could grow and sell produce even in the off-season, dramatically increasing their marketability and their income. Both Polak’s organization, IDE, and Fisher’s, KickStart, have worked extensively designing such systems. IDE and KickStart (independently of each other) developed a version of an inexpensive foot-powered treadle pump. Polak also recently developed a low-cost, expandable water storage system, and KickStart, Fisher’s company, has recently developed a hip-operated water pump, even less expensive than the treadle pump. But designing a good product, it turned out, was only part of the challenge. In order to provide a steady, dependable supply of products, the engineers had to also design a profitable supply chain, often completely from scratch—producers, wholesalers, resellers, salespeople. There were hurdles almost every step of the way. For starters, it proved difficult to get big companies to “think small.” For many big companies, says Polak, producing a low-cost, low-tech and comparatively low-quality product is simply anathema. They feel it would compromise their brand and their reputation, and they believe a market made up of poor people isn’t big enough to justify it. Polak adds that in universities around the world, virtually all agriculture research and development focuses on large-scale, high-tech farming. And yet, as Polak also points out, 85 percent of all farms worldwide are smaller than five acres. In developing countries, these small farms produce more than half of the countries’ meat, produce and dairy. In aggregate, this is a huge market with huge potential. The experience that Polak and his company had in Bangladesh provides a good example of the entire process. There, they were able to recruit 75 small-scale manufacturers to produce low-cost treadle pumps and to convince local retailers to carry them. Then, to convince poor farmers to take a chance on buying the newfangled gadget, IDE created demonstration plots, hired traveling troubadours to compose and sing songs celebrating the pump and even produced a People who buy or work for things, Fisher says, tend to be much more invested in them than people who receive them as outright charity. feature-length film, in which the pump played a central role, that played to a million rural people a year with the help of a generator and a portable screen. Once farmers began using the pump and saw that it worked, the marketing became much easier. The supply chain began to work, profitably, for everyone. And farmers, within a year, began to see results that made their investment worthwhile. As it turns out, being able to produce fruits, vegetables, and spices for a year-round market has had a dramatic effect on a poor farmer’s income. Bahadur, a farmer who worked with Polak in Bangladesh, bought a low-cost drip irrigation system and grew cucumbers and other high-dollar crops by using it to access a stream on his www.heifer.org March/April 2008 | WORLD ARK 15 http://www.heifer.org
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