Poor People's Knowledge Helping Poor People to Earn from Their Knowledge

How can we help poor people to earn more from their knowledge rather than from their sweat and muscle? This paper summarizes a collection of essays that investigate the promotion of “poor people’s knowledge”—promoting the innovation, knowledge, and creative skills of poor people in poor countries, and particularly improving the earnings of poor people from such knowledge and skills. The collection is a modest attempt to look at the issue from the perspective of the economic value of poor people’s knowledge. It is about the knowledge poor people own, create, and sell rather than about what they buy. It is a collection of stories of attempts to increase poor people’s earnings from their knowledge. The essays call attention to a broader range of knowledge that has commercial potential in developing countries, and bring an economic dimension into the discussion of traditional knowledge. They highlight the incentives for and concerns of poor people— which may be different from those of corporate research, Northern nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), or already successful entertainment stars. The essays demonstrate that the best answer is sometimes commercial rather than legal (for example, obtaining a formal patent or copyright protection), although in some instances standard legal approaches have been effective and it is useful to identify the problems in which legal innovation is really needed. In addition, there are many income-earning (rather than income-using) dimensions of culture. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 3205, February 2004 The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the view of the World Bank, its Executive Directors, or the countries they represent. Policy Research Working Papers are available online at http://econ.worldbank.org. 1 Poor People’s Knowledge: Helping Poor People to Earn from Their Knowledge, edited by J. Michael Finger and Philip Schuler. World Bank and Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2003. P ub lic D is cl os ur e A ut ho riz ed P ub lic D is cl os ur e A ut ho riz ed P ub lic D is cl os ur e A ut ho riz ed P ub lic D is cl os ur e A ut ho riz ed P ub lic D is cl os ur e A ut ho riz ed P ub lic D is cl os ur e A ut ho riz ed P ub lic D is cl os ur e A ut ho riz ed P ub lic D is cl os ur e A ut ho riz ed Introduction and Overview