Ripple Effect

Sangeeta Chowdhry is Acumen Fund’s Ripple Effect manager. The India phase of  Ripple Effect included pilot programs by 5 organizations, the Jal Bhagirathi Foundation among them.

The Ripple Effect project presented the Jal Bhagirathi Foundation (JBF) in the Thar desert of Rajasthan with quite a challenge: Improve access to safe drinking water in the area in just 8 weeks. Not only did they meet this challenge but they went a step further - and added an additional goal – to create livelihood opportunities for women in the process!

The story of JBF is an inspiring one — as can be seen in this recent coverage on Indian television. For a start, the challenges addressed are not small. The project began in a region with highly saline ground water, rainfall of no more than 10-50 cm per year and temperatures of over 50C (over 110 degrees Fahrenheit) in summer. A few years ago, in an attempt to bring high quality, affordable water to the community, they had launched one reverse osmosis plant in Pachpadra village. While the plant was successful in providing safe drinking water at reasonable prices to customers who came to the plant, those customers had to walk around 2km to do so. JBF struggled to make it a sustainable business that reached larger numbers of people who could not travel the distance.

With the help of a small grant of $15,000 and business coaching provided by the Ripple Effect team, JBF created a viable water distribution business model that addressed these challenges. They established water outlets in villages that are managed and owned by women from local self-help groups (SHG), and also increased water sales from the plant itself.

Critical to the long-term impact of the Ripple Effect project, work was also done to make these advances sustainable. Work was done with JBF to understand the unit economics of the operation.  Once it was understood how much water needed to be sold per day, it became a matter of developing a strategy that would lead to multiple sales channels – wholesale to tankers and retail to individuals from the plant in addition to sales to and from the local outlets. Pricing models were then created to support this business plan.

This planning was essential but JBF’s commitment and enthusiasm was what really took this Pilot on to achieve results. In a span of the 8 short weeks of the Ripple Effect Pilot Project, JBF trained SHG members in business management; established four water outlets managed by the women entrepreneurs; improved the infrastructure of the treatment plant to fill a water tanker in 15 minutes instead of the typical 2 hours; created business plans for the main plant and the outlets and executed aggressive awareness campaigns in the village of benefits of safe water.

This careful planning, passion and commitment has reaped results that can serve as a viable delivery model in rural parts of India.  The water sale from the plant increased from an average of 2000 liters per day to 16,000 liters per day and the distance walked to fetch the water was reduced from 2 km to under 500m. Most significant, however, is that women operating the outlets are earning a living from their micro-enterprises and that, compared to a few short months before, thousands more people now have safe drinking water available.

Jal Bhagirathi Foundation has now turned over the running of the plant and it’s operations to the local village body, and is now planning to replicate the success of Pachpadra in 13 more villages in Rajasthan.

See more on this remarkable project here on local TV news:

• MAGNUM in Motion: Our friend and advisor, the MAGNUM photographer Susan Meiselas, just completed a powerful photo essay with Human Rights Watch on maternal mortality in India.  “In Silence” makes the case for Acumen Fund’s investment in LifeSpring hospitals and 1298 ambulance service.

• Interview with LifeSpring’s CEO: You can hear Anant Kumar, the visionary head of LifeSpring, in a podcast in the Social Innovations Conversations series.

• Congrats to D.light: D.light Design was awarded the Social Venture Network 2009 Innovation Award, which recognizes and supports the leaders of emerging enterprises.

• Kashf on Oprah: Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s new book, Half the Sky, includes the story of a Kashf Foundation client, which they recently shared on the Oprah Winfrey show.

• Design thinking in BusinessWeek: A BusinessWeek blog post talks about Acumen Fund’s work with Ripple Effect, featuring a video clip of our own Yasmina Zaidman.

Time for responsibility: As part of a special section on community service and responsibility, Time magazine just put out a list of “Responsibility Pioneers.” Acumen Fund is among them, along with investee D.Light Design, and peer organizations like KickStart, Ashoka and Living Goods. (Full list here.)

Ripple Effect makes a splash: IDEO and Acumen Fund have been partnering around innovation in the water sector, as this story on Forbes.com highlights.

Ecotact in the news: This video on CNN.com showcases the work of Acumen Fund investee Ecotact, which provides sanitation services in Kenya, as well as David Kuria, the entrepreneur behind the organization.

Outlook on GEWP: Outlook India recently featured this article on the success of drip irrigation and GEWP.

The pulse of Pulse: VentureBeat looks at the development and progress of Pulse as a platform for metrics in the social investing space.

It’s hard to miss the swell of excitement surrounding the SoCap09, the upcoming Social Capital Markets conference in San Francisco from September 1 - 3.  If you haven’t hear about it, Acumen Fund partner, NextBillion has an excellent series of blog posts that will convince you that its a can’t miss opportunity - here, here and here.  And if need MORE reasons to attend, check out Change.org’s series of spotlights on the conference.   Acumen Fund agrees with most of these reasons and will be sending a team to participate in the conference.  It will be a great opportunity to meet us and learn about some of the exciting projects we’ve been working on.  Here’s a list of the panels that Acumen Fund team members will be sitting on:

• Breakout Session # 1 on September 1st @ 3:30 - Sangeeta Chowdry will be on the “Disruptive Innovation” panel.  Along with Sally Madsen from IDEO, she’ll be sharing her experience with the Ripple Effect project - an innovative initiative to use design and business strategies to tackle the challenges of transporting and storing clean water in India and East Africa.
• Breakout Session #1 on September 2nd @11:15 - Rob Katz will be speaking on the “Measuring Life at the Base of the Pyramid: Scale and Leverage for the $2 a Day Population plenary.  Rob is the founder of NextBillion.net and co-author of the Next 4 Billion report
• Plenary panel on September 2nd @ 10:00 - Brian Trelstad will be on the “True Tales of Amazement and Horror From the Fundraising Circuit” hosted by Stuart Davidson from Labrador Ventures.
• Plenary Address on September 2nd @ 4:15 - Brad Presner will be participating on the “From IRIS to GIIRS to New Money” plenary.   Along with B-Lab and Rockefeller Foundation, this will be an unique opportunity to learn more about the emerging social metrics standards and the money the industry is hoping to attract.

Finally, whether you are at the conference or not, make sure to check in with NextBillion, a conference media partner, as they tweet and blog about the conference from the BoP perspective.

We hope to see you there!

Thanks to Majid Mirza, a summer intern with our investee Micro Drip, we’d like to share some incredible unfiltered footage about what’s happening behind the scenes in Pakistan. Check out all of the videos at his blog here or on his YouTube channel.

The Ripple Effect team heads to Kenya for the second part of their project’s implementation.  The Ripple Effect project delivers hands-on innovation training, business expertise and a sense of urgency to a select group of companies and organizations that are developing solutions for the delivery and storage of clean water in India and East Africa.  Follow their blog to learn more.

Ripple Effect team in Kenya

Acumen Fund is co-sponsoring The Next: 2010 Case Writing Competition along with the William Davidson Institute and the World Resources Institute.  The case writing competition is open to students and faculty members at both the undergraduate and graduate level.  Case submissions must be on a social venture (e.g., VisionSpring) or a relevant base of the pyramid topic (e.g., the role of subsidies in social ventures).  Read more here.

This post was originally posted on the Ripple Effect blog by Acumen Fund’s Sangeeta Chowdry - Ripple Effect Project Manager.

At the edges of the Thar desert in Rajasthan, in the region of Marwar -The Land of Death- Jal Bhagirathi Foundation, a Ripple Effect pilot awardee, has been working to bring water security to village communities. This is no small challenge in a region where the average annual rainfall is a mere 100-500mm and the water table is declining at a rate of 1-2 meters a year. The focus of communities here is to get access to any water at all – let alone safe water. It is in this environment that JBF has, amongst other water harvesting initiatives, been running a reverse-osmosis treatment plant in Pachpadra, about 100 km from Jodhpur.

Ripple Effect and JBF have been working together to develop a sustainable business model to extend access to safe drinking water to households located at a distance from the RO plant. This model not only aims to meet the water needs of these communities but also to provide a source of empowerment through livelihood provision to the members of local self-help groups.

The model that is being operationalized has water from the reverse-osmosis plant delivered to several distribution outlets run by members of the local self-help group where it is then sold on to other households. By reaching both wholesale and retail users, the output of the plant is being tripled and local incomes increased. The careful and collaborative business planning that went into the model has enhanced its potential for viability and sustainability – costs of operations have been carefully determined; a break-even analysis has been performed; and a tiered pricing strategy implemented.

Planning can, however, only go so far. Critical to the success of this model is the buy-in of the community – water quality was not previously seen as a high priority – and a powerful awareness-raising and marketing campaign was essential. In this area JBF’s passionate work made all the difference. In a few short weeks multiple meetings and discussions were held with self-help groups; market surveys of hundreds of households were completed; individuals selected and trained to run outlets; many hours of physical labour dedicated to gearing the plant to handle the up-scaled operations; and multiple community awareness activities have been undertaken and will continue. It has been most heartening to watch the skeptical village Sarpanch, turn into the foremost champion of the project and lead a rally through the village to announce the work! The local media too has picked up on the work being done and has publicized this swaach (safe) water initiative.

It has been truly remarkable to have been on this journey with JBF and to see the synergies from effective public, private, community partnership. At the time of writing this, the demand of the water at the outlets has already reached twice the initial target!