Working World

It looks a little like a StairMaster, but it’s actually a one-person leg-powered irrigation pump, and it’s created more than 42,000 new micro-enterprises thriving in Kenya and Tanzania. The MoneyMaker pump is the top-selling product of a nonprofit company called KickStart and has lifted tens of thousands of people and their families out of dire poverty over the past 15 years.

Martin Fisher and Nick Moon, co-founders of KickStart, have been honored as two of the world’s outstanding social entrepreneurs by the Schwab Foundation and the Skoll Foundation. KickStart received the Newsweek magazine 2003 citation for "Inventions that Will Change the World" and won a Fast Company/Monitor Group Social Capitalist Award in 2006. Fisher and Moon have been instrumental in not just selling affordable products to small entrepreneurs in Africa, but creating a whole new development model.

The two men met in 1991, when they both worked for a British nonprofit in Kenya called ActionAid. Fisher had graduated from Stanford with a Ph.D. in theoretical and applied mechanics. He had gone to Kenya on a Fulbright Fellowship to study the development of appropriate technology for third world countries. He started out as a socialist who believed in community-based businesses, but he and Moon both came to understand that give-away aid programs such as the one they were working for weren’t sustainable, were competing with small entrepreneurs, and weren’t investing in the people who wanted to start small businesses—businesses that would actually energize the economy.

They quit ActionAid, rented a run-down house in Nairobi and started ApproTec (for "Appropriate Technology"), the company that later became KickStart. They developed several low-tech devices that people could buy and use to make money, such as a sunflower seed press for making cooking oil. However, 90 percent of their business has come from the MoneyMaker pump, whose basic design had been used in Bangladesh. Fisher modified it to be more useful to the Kenyans: It became portable for locking up at night, with a shorter tread that was easier to use by women in long dresses. They sold the first one in 1996 for $55.

The Africans who buy and use this pump to irrigate their farmland can change a bit of land that barely grows enough food to feed their own family into an irrigated plot productive enough to grow three or four seasonal crops per year. The surplus food can be sold for cash, which then buys the family improved shelter, healthcare, clothing and education for their children. This lifts a family out of extreme poverty, enabling them to rent more land or open a store, and the ripple effect creates more jobs as they hire help and spend money in their community.

A small farm that had only made $110 in profits can, with the MoneyMaker pump, generate $1,100 in profits annually, creating a middle class in areas where there was virtually none.

KickStart has embarked on very ambitious expansion plans. The immediate goal is to go into three more African countries and provide economic empowerment to another 400,000 people. A new nonprofit development and collaboration office in the San Francisco area is raising funds for this endeavor, appealing to corporations and philanthropists to invest in this expansion.

Suzanne Ridgway is a freelance writer and regular columnist for Working World and Working Nurse magazines. Suzanne also writes grant proposals for nonprofit organizations.