Beating Poverty in Kenya

[Fran]

Here's an excellent article on how two entrepreneurs help 25 families out of poverty every day. They developed man-powered water pumps that increased the crop yield of the farmers' land by 6-10 times, which they SOLD to the farmers through their not-for-profit organisation. This meant that with their increased revenue, the farmers themselves could pay for food, medical care, their children's education, etc.

Dream Harvest

A simple water pump has lifted thousands of African families out of poverty. Miles Bredin meets Nick Moon and Martin Fisher, creators of the device.

Just five years ago, Kenyan farmer Samuel Mburu was nearly destitute. He’d often had to fight with other unlicensed hawkers and with police on the streets of Nairobi, just to sell the meagre produce from his small vegetable patch. Today his is a very different story.

Mburu and his wife, Faith, educate their seven children privately, they go to a doctor when they are ill and there is always food on the table.

They achieved all this with the sweat of their brows but they were shown the way by two clever men – Nick Moon and Martin Fisher of KickStart, a non-profit organisation that develops and markets new technologies in Africa. The pair designed, manufactured and sold Mburu a MoneyMaker water-pump, which has allowed him to increase the size of his farm, cultivate more of it and reap three or four harvests a year when before there was only one.

Mburu’s small farm just outside Nairobi may look like an earthly paradise when the sun is shining and the crops are growing, but cultivating the plot without pumped water was back-breaking work and it was physically impossible to do much more than subsist. “We used to have to water everything with a bucket,” says Faith.

Of course Mburu and his family are not the only people British partners Moon and Fisher have helped. They have a mission. They gave up being aid workers to invent and market tools that they hope will help create a middle class from the poverty-stricken masses of Africa. Without a middle class they – like many others – believe that there will be no democracy in Africa. They have already lifted 80,000 families out of poverty – not by giving them things they didn’t really need but by selling them practical and simple solutions to everyday problems.

“People at the bottom of society’s pyramid are exactly the same as everybody else,” says Moon. “All they want to do is look after their families. We say, ‘Here is a chance’ but we insist on offering solutions for sale through the market place.” By doing so, KickStart builds sustainability into its assistance and ensures that people like Mburu have a stake in their future. KickStart has been hailed around the world, winning awards for its products and funding for research. Already it has expanded its range to sell pumps, oil presses and brick makers in three African countries. Over the next few years, it plans further expansion.

Moon and Fisher both criss-crossed the globe before ending up in Kenya in the Eighties. Moon was born in 1954 in Bombay, where his father was P&O executive. His family came to the UK when he was eight. He left school at 17 and, after a number of jobs, joined the VSO and first went to Kenya in 1982.

Fisher was born in Golders Green in 1958 and moved with his family to the USA when he was eight. Armed with a Master’s degree and a PhD, he went trekking in Peru to ponder his career options, and that was where he encountered ‘real poverty’ for the first time. He returned to the States determined to do something to help and was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to visit Kenya to see how technology was being used in rural development. He ended up at ActionAid, where he met Moon. He now lives in San Francisco, where he drums up funding for Moon. Moon lives in Nairobi with Rose, his Kenyan wife, and their five children. He handles the day-to-day running of KickStart, making MoneyMaker pumps and other vital equipment for people like the Mburu family.

Both Moon and Fisher maintain close links with the UK, “coming home” as often as possible to visit family and friends. Moon is an ardent supporter of arsenal. He says the thing he misses the most is a pint of bitter. Fisher has clung to his British accent. “Although I sound very American to most Brits, Americans seem to think that I have a very strong British accent – it’s mid-Atlantic, I guess.”

While working for ActionAid, Moon and Fisher helped Kenyans build schools, water projects and small industries. But they became disillusioned with setting up women’s and youth groups with developments projects that collapsed soon after they left. They realised that in many cases they were doing more harm than good. By subsidising community groups to launch enterprises in which the people had little interest, they were in fact penalising local entrepreneurs who were unable to compete with a charity.

“It dawned on us over time,” says Fisher. “We just thought, ‘this isn’t working – why?’”

In 1991 they left their comfortable jobs and set up KickStart as a “social enterprise that fights poverty by assisting cash-poor rural people to start profitable and productive enterprises to create wealth and contribute to economic growth.” Their basic premise was that the poor of Africa live in a cash economy and don’t need education and healthcare per se, but the cash with which to buy them.

Having designed water projects and set up classrooms in the past, they decided to address poverty in other ways. They worked out that the quickest way to get a return was to use the capital and energy available. There was plenty of intelligent unemployed energy, and the land was capital. They combined the two by using human energy to pump the water that would make land more profitable. Like a pulley system, the MoneyMaker pump magnifies available human energy. The mongrel offspring of a bicycle pump and a StairMaster gym machine, its ingenuity lies in the fact that it uses the body weight of the pumper and the strength of his legs and upper body rather than the weaker arms.

KickStart has sold 66,354 MoneyMakers and poor entrepreneurs have invested $5 million of their own money to set up 44,000 family enterprises that at present earn more than $47 million in annual profits. The maths is staggeringly simple. “In Kenya without irrigation,” says Fisher, “you get $150 per acre per year. Irrigate that and you get $3,000 per season. That’s with very fancy irrigation, of course. We don’t do as well as that but when someone buys one of our pumps the net farm income goes up six to ten times.”

Back at Mburu’s farm, you can see the impact irrigation makes, but to buy a MoneyMaker is a giant leap of faith. At just under $100 in a country where most survive on a dollar a day, buying a pump is no small step. Faith says, “We were doing the watering with a bucket and I used to have to pick cashews but now I don’t. I’m very happy that my husband saw that far ahead to buy it – although at first I didn’t think it was a good idea.”

It took them a few months to decide to buy the pump on credit in Saba Saba, the local town. After a couple of initial payments the dealer allowed Mburu to take the pump and pay the balance after his first harvest. They paid in full and on time. Their farm now stands out from neighbours’ plots, where children and grandmothers still water with buckets to produce patchy and inferior crops. At the start of the rains, the area looks green and pleasant, but it lies only 100km from the equator and, without irrigation, it can turn arid after only a couple of weeks of drought. Two of their neighbours are now saving for pumps.

Now the Mburu’s seven children no longer have to remain at home while their mother works and their father risks arrest to hawk vegetables in faraway Nairobi. “I have been able to dig a well with income from the farm,” says Mburu. “I send my kids to school and two are at technical college. I buy medicines. I have bought dairy cows and goats. I can now buy a motorised pump and I employ people and pay rent for several parcels of land.”

“Poor people are just like us,” says Moon, “If you give them the opportunity to make money, they can buy the things they need like food, education and healthcare. We want to create dignity, not dependence.”

I am now treated with respect within the community,” says Mburu. I am chairman of a group of 25 farmers and we supply an export company in Nairobi.” Before MoneyMaker, his parched vegetables were hard to sell in Nairobi; today his beans are sold on British supermarket shelves. “You can grow a variety of crops with a pump,” he says. “You can plan with a pump.” Thus he grows vegetables that need plenty of water in the dry season, ensuring that he is paid premium prices for his labour.

With such obvious contentment stemming from their ideas, Moon and Fisher would be entitled to feel smug. But instead they are refreshingly ambitious. They are now working on a “Deep Lift Pump” which can draw water up from a much deeper level. “It will be human-powered and hopefully should cost less than $150. A number of prototypes are already working the field. It will enable many more people to get into irrigated agriculture in places where the existing models cannot work,” says Moon.

KickStart is also designing a manual borehole drilling machine and testing an entry-level hip pump, which will sell for just $35. The organisation has a 25% funded three-year plan to raise another 400,000 people from poverty. Ambitious? Maybe, but Moon explains: “I stay keen because I love what we do, and the results are so visible, tangible and satisfying.”

By fulfilling their ideals and discarding well-meaning but ineffective ideas, they have achieved what African governments, donors and international aid agencies spend millions failing to do. Every day KickStart lifts 25 families out of poverty. But most importantly, by making them pay for the privilege, Nick Moon and Martin Fisher ensure that they stay there.

For more details see http://kickstart.org/tech/pumps/

Taken from Saga magazine, January 2007

http://www.saga.co.uk/magazine/

Edited January 2, 2007 by Fran

[Judith]

Bravo. It's good to see people doing this kind of thing. And they're right; it will help the politics over there too.

Judith