the IDE story

In the early 1980s, University of Western Ontario graduate, psychiatrist and entrepreneur Paul Polak dreamed up a plan to fight poverty using business principles.

Along with Winnipeg businessman Art DeFehr and a young Ontario graduate named Gerry Dyck, he formed an enterprise that built donkey carts from scrap and sold them to enterprising refugees, who then made money transporting water and other goods in the camps.

Building on this success, Polak formed IDE and set about marketing treadle pumps in Bangladesh. The low-cost foot-powered irrigation pumps provided a rapid and dramatic boost to farmers who had been living on a dollar a day. Many of them doubled their income in the first year. Since then, IDE has helped to increase the incomes of over three million farmers by developing low-cost irrigation technology and identifying better market opportunities.

The key to IDE’s unique approach, says Polak, is to “learn from the customer. I interview at least 100 farmers every year. And that’s what everybody at IDE does so well. That’s where the strength of the model comes from.”

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