World Ark Magazine - March/April 2008 - (Page 33) 8 9 10 1 1 12 0 6 7 See and do the obvious. If we can’t see our blind spots, how can we begin to see and do the obvious? It took me several years and several hundred interviews with poor families to begin to see this fact. Three-quarters of the dollar-a-day poverty in the world has its roots in tiny farms. Ninety-eight percent of all the farms in China, 96 percent of the farms in Bangladesh, 87 percent of the farms in Ethiopia and 80 percent of the farms in India are smaller than five acres. Eight hundred million of the people who earn less than a dollar a day scratch most of what they earn out of one-acre farms that are divided into four or five scattered quarter-acre plots. International Development Enterprises (IDE), the small organization I started, has been able to help 17 million people out of poverty because we realized that creating new wealth on one-acre farms depends on opening access to new forms of irrigation, agriculture, markets and design. search If somebody has already invented it, you don’t need to do so again. People are often hesitant to use ideas from elsewhere. I have run into countless instances of the not-invented-here syndrome. Doing a quick search to see if somebody has already come up with an appropriate solution is always faster and easier than coming up with something new. see I was convinced that I had found a new way of delivering water cheaply, drop by drop, to plants by punching holes in plastic pipes and letting water slowly dribble out. Dan Spare, the first engineer I talked to about this great idea of mine, politely informed me that the Israelis had invented it 35 years earlier and that it was called “drip irrigation.” I had never heard of it. Make sure your approach has positive, measurable impacts that can be brought to scale. How many people can benefit from a development project if it proves to be successful? This is one of the first questions to be asked about any idea for a practical solution, since it takes a lot of time and money to implement a project. But often this question is never asked. For example, a few refugees in Somalia who lived in camps beside rivers and caught catfish to sell could broaden their markets by preserving the fish through salting and smoking, since refrigeration was unavailable. But all refugees needed affordable transport services, so picking between fish smokers and donkey carts was a no-brainer. 8 www.heifer.org The only projects worth doing have measurable costs, impacts that are an improvement over their antecedents and the potential to be brought to scale. March/April 2008 | WORLD ARK 33 http://www.heifer.org
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