This is a really interesting topic! I am surprised that despite man’s inherent corruption and greed since the beginning of time, business men/women have consistently overlooked “the poor” as the largest and most desperate “customers” in the world (with the exception of Coca-Cola). Man’s further thought into this subject with a customer/client-style approach could potentially lead to serious changes in the quality of life throughout world.

With 3 billion of the world's population currently living on $2.50/day, it will likely take more than one approach to radically start changing the quality of life around the globe. Unfortunately, many of the issues that continue to keep people in poverty concern basic necessities; water, food, general cleanliness, etc. While IDE (and Paul Polak) provide an extremely valuable service (and portfolio of products) to these "customers," I think that the future of social work will involve collaborations between microfinance institutions (MFIs), "sustainable" farming organizations, and more general social work organizations. By combining the knowledge, personnel, and resources of each of these fields (finance, food, water, etc.), we may begin to see more radical (in a good way) change in the way that people live and survive globally. (As a side note, collaboration could also provide substantial revenue for those organizations involved as it would open the market to include the millions of people currently overlooked by the vast majority of businesses.) I do not mean that NGOs should take a Wal-Mart or HP approach by venturing too far outside their core competencies or by becoming so large that the bureaucracy of the organization stifles the effectiveness of the entity. Instead, I think that these different organizations should seek to seriously start bringing large numbers of people out of poverty by entering into limited partnerships/collaborations/joint ventures with each other: i.e. share resources with each other and stop the “negative-competition” that often exists between NGOs (especially MFIs).

Additionally, by approaching the issue of "poverty-alleviation" through a "net-zero" approach, less responsibility will be put on governments (good), more emphasis will be placed on conservation and the reuse of funds (micro-financing), and people as a whole will be held more accountable for the lives of others. (Although usually used in discussions concerning energy consumption in buildings, I believe that the concept of “net-zero” also carries weight in this discussion. I would rather use the term "net-zero" than “sustainable” as nothing man does can truly be deemed infinitely sustaining. Also, I think that the term “sustainable” has been used so often in business and university that it has lost its true meaning. Tangent, sorry.)

Anyways, nice blurb about the subject and thanks for posting it.