Entrepreneurs are everywhere.
Let’s hear it for supply chains. And micro loans. And sales agents on motorbikes. Let’s give people a chance to earn an income and buy aspirational products designed specifically for them. Let’s put our entrepreneurial spirit to work to inspire theirs.
Solving Poverty with Profit.
Our founder, Paul Polak, was working in Somalia in the early eighties when he began to develop his philosophies and methodologies related to market-based solutions and human-centered design for solving poverty.
Today, we continue to build on those founding principles, living where we work, and always putting the needs of the poor and vulnerable at the center of everything we do.
We're on a mission to develop innovative and compassionate solutions for the most pressing needs in the developing world.
Support from donors and foundations funds our efforts to directly address the parts of peoples’ lives that matter—we’re looking for what works, and you can help.
We have boots on the ground in eleven countries on three continents, and our teams live in the provinces, districts, and villages where we work.
WHAT’S HAPPENING AT iDE
Celebrating a milestone: 200,000 toilets sold in just 18 months
This is a major milestone—for iDE’s WASH team and for our partners, who dedicated two years to lay the foundation for this market system, and then a year and a half to catalyze sales. We’re celebrating it now because it signals a proven approach capable of reaching scale in a cost-effective way.
May 23, 2017
Real-time data connects fractured supply chains
Real-time data enabled us to design the largest sanitation marketing program in the world. Every month in Cambodia, about 6,000 toilet orders are captured on a mobile app, synced with our cloud-based servers, matched with the best-suited toilet producer, and fulfilled by our supply chain coordinators.
May 9, 2017
Investing in Scale
“With restricted funding, you can add more gas to the car to go further, but with unrestricted funding, you can improve the engine and accelerate your speed, going further and faster in the long-run,” says iDE Global WASH Director Yi Wei in a series highlighting the The Barry & Marie Lipman Family Prize on Pyxera Global.
May 18, 2017
