Outside, it is grey and rainy, but inside, the Camden library is warm and inviting.  Today's special session merited an early arrival to Pop!Tech: Scaling the Bottom of the Pyramid, a 2-hour talk by longtime BoP innovators Paul Polak and Bunker Roy.

Bill Gordon, a Pop!Tech board member, kicks things, describing Pop!Tech's active social change mission – realized through its Accelerator and Social Innovation Fellows Programs.  He then introduces today’s speakers as the "heavyweights of the social enterprise world."  I, for one, don't argue with that description.

Bunker Roy admits that he is the product of a "very expensive, elitist education" in India, which prepared him for a career as a doctor, engineer or diplomat. When he decided to work in a village instead however, his mother was appalled; but it marked the beginning of a remarkable career.

Roy founded the Barefoot College, a school only for the poor, in 1971. He asserts that rural India is full of professionals not recognized for their skills, such as water diviners and traditional midwives. His college is open only to people without a formal education and seeks to combine the knowledge of local people with modern technologies.

Roy's students create buildings that harvest rainwater and win architectural awards without a professional architect's involvement. They share knowledge and learn other skills, which they share back home.  In 38 years, the Barefoot College has served 3 million people who live on less than $1 per day.

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Paul Polak is wearing a sweater vest.  This will come as no surprise to anyone who’s met him or seen him speak.  The man loves sweaters – cardigans, sweater vests, pullovers.  Hell, in Camden today – with temperatures hovering around 40 degrees in the midday sun – Paul’s sweater makes a lot of sense.  But despite his grandfatherly image, Paul is a truly a young, tireless innovator and entrepreneur at heart.  

Polak is the founder of the non-profit International Development Enterprises (IDE) and the author of Out of Poverty (review here).  He is dedicated to developing practical solutions that attack poverty at its roots. For the past 25 years, Paul has worked with thousands of farmers in countries around the world to help design and produce low–cost, income–generating products that have already moved 17 million people out of poverty.

His goal - like Bunker Roy's - is to create a franchise of barefoot, women microentrepreneurs based on the ruthless pursuit of affordability. Polak suggests that a company could set up a water kiosk where entrepreneurs could sell water at an affordable price, profitably.  (Sounds familiar!)

He starts his presentation with some seemingly random facts – 200 million Americans have hemorrhoids; men talk on cell phones 16 percent more than women do.  His point: we know everything we need to know (and more) about affluent consumers.  But we know next to nothing about the other 90 percent of the world's customers.

Serving these customers means re-thinking business.  But it also means re-thinking development.  To do so, Polak has based his work on what he calls the three great poverty eradication myths:

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The initial $100 price tag of the XO Laptop from Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) created quite a furor when it was first announced three years ago. At the time, the cheapest laptops were hovering around $400 to $500.

This subject has been rehashed many times in the press and the blogosphere, but reading a recent report on Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for computers deployed in schools in India prompted me to write about the pricing debate and what can be learned from it. A longer version of the report can be found here.

The report was prepared by VitalWave Consulting, a firm specializing in consulting and research for technology companies growing businesses in emerging markets. They performed a study in India, funded by Microsoft, on the TCO of computers deployed in schools. They built a model that took various factors into consideration when estimating the total cost of owning a computer over a period of time.

Purchase cost, maintenance, support, training, replacement cycle, and electricity cost are just a few of the elements they factored in. They looked at desktops, laptops, and ultra low-cost laptops like the XO and Intel's Classmate PC. The report also compares the differences between TCO in India and TCO in a "global" model.

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