Entrepreneurs: Get Involved
by Miki Saxon
Entrepreneurs who make a difference are my favorite people, whether they do it in for-profit or non-profit mode.
The two I’m highlighting today are both non-profits and both are doing the kind of innovation you’ll want to support.
What do you consider the most basic need for the poor, isolated, rural villages in African nations? If your response is sanitation, clean water, access to healthcare or education you would be one level too high.
All of those mentioned are like apps, but apps that need a common platform to work. So the most basic need; the one that makes the others possible is energy.
And energy is what Sivan Borowich-Ya’ari’s non-profit supplies.
Innovation: Africa, a non-profit that brings Israeli innovation to African villages. In five years, Innovation: Africa has provided electricity, clean water, food and medical care to more than 450,000 people in Ethiopia, Tanzania, Malawi and Uganda.
While solar panels solved the energy-generation problem, the system wasn’t sustainable, because there was no money to replace the needed light bulbs and batteries.
Innovation: Africa solved that by helping create a micro business that generated enough revenue to pay the replacement costs.
People come from the villages surrounding the clinic to charge their cell phones, paying 10 to 15 cents. That money is collected, deposited in a bank and used for two things. One, to buy light bulbs. Second, to replace the batteries. So, we are providing the villagers the solar energy and also a way to generate income so that they can sustain it.
Sound interesting? Why not put a group together and adopt a project?
The best practice would be to adopt a project; we have at least 38 villages now that are waiting for energy. We know that it’s quite urgent. We would like to do it by 2014. …adopt a specific school or an orphanage, a medical clinic and speak to those children directly and figure out their needs.
D-Rev is a non-profit product development group whose solutions sit atop that energy platform.
Its original focus was to redesign medical devices for poor areas (the first is a phototherapy system that addresses the widespread problem of infant jaundice) and then work with third-party, for-profit distribution companies.
But that didn’t work.
“We thought if you design a good product, it will scale on its own,” Krista Donaldson said. “That works in efficient markets, but most developing communities don’t have efficient markets.” (…) D-Rev has had to become far more involved than it expected in financial models, licensing deals, consulting services and manufacturing arrangements. In essence, it is redesigning not only high-tech products but also supply chains and procurement systems.
I hope you will take a few minutes to read the articles and choose to get involved; if not with one of these then find something that ignites your passion and, as Nike would say, just do it.
Image credit: Innovation: Africa
