We’ve just posted a video to Acumen’s website that gives a fantastic glimpse into the types of communities where WaterHealth International (WHI) works — delivering safe, affordable drinking water. We had the opportunity to visit the Nehru Nagar Colony, a rural community situated 40 minutes outside the city of Vijayawada in the state of Andhra Pradesh, India. Several women in the community told us that before WaterHealth installed its plant, people collected water from a nearby pond or small “step” wells. Water quality from these sources is very poor; during our visit, we noticed cattle bathing in the nearby pond and a frog swimming in the step well. The water had a murky green tint to it, and tested positive for bacteriological contamination. Not exactly the stuff you’d want in your cup.
By contrast, the water flowing out of WHI’s plant – filtered and disinfected with ultraviolet light – was crystal clear and free of disease-causing microbes. WHI conducts a full battery of chemical and bacteriological tests frequently to ensure this high standard of quality. And on this brutally hot day, the water was also delicious – a key reason why customers choose to buy. Women also mentioned health improvements from using the water and savings on medical costs, which is the real reason WHI does this work.
Check out the video and let us know what you think.
Marc Manara is a Water Portfolio Manager for Acumen Fund, based in New York.
The Acumen Fellows program, which announced the new Class of 2011 this week, has been nominated for the John P. McNulty Prize, recognizing the best in high-impact leadership.
Ryan Allis, social angel investor, writes of social investing and The Giving Challenge, “an effort to invite the wealthiest individuals and families in America to commit to giving the majority of their wealth to philanthropy.” He talks of the open opportunity to support entrepreneurs who seek financing between the level of microfinance and larger funds like Acumen.
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:
Toilet talk may be taboo in most professional situations, but at World Water Week, toilets were a hot topic.
For those unfamiliar with World Water Week, it is an annual meeting of water experts, practitioners and leaders from around the globe to discuss the world’s most urgent water issues. This year’s meeting was held August 16-21 in Stockholm, and ideas were exchanged on many water-related topics, ranging from water management practices to sustainable business models to research on health impacts to policy. (For those interested, presentations from the event can be downloaded for free here).
This year saw a number of sessions focused on sanitation (a.k.a. toilets). The raw statistics around sanitation are shocking: 2.4 billion people (more than 1/3 of the world’s population) lack access to adequate toilet facilities. One in five children dies of diarrheal diseases, and 88% of diarrhea cases are caused by either unsafe drinking water, inadequate sanitation or poor hygiene.
Sanitation challenges are intimately linked with the lack of infrastructure investments in rural areas and informal settlements and slums, but solutions are emerging that can be applied by individuals and communities without a need to rely on large-scale centralized investments. It was encouraging to see entrepreneurs developing models for improving access to safe, hygienic toilets that can be distributed widely at affordable prices.
Dr. Brindeshwar Pathak, a sanitation innovator who founded the Sulabh Sanitation Movement, was the most prominent example: he was awarded the 2009 Stockholm Water Prize for his pioneering work in developing cost-effective toilet solutions and his work to change social attitudes toward unsanitary latrine practices. The scale of Sulabh is truly impressive, and the preservation of human dignity lies at the core of their work.
Another, earlier stage, example that stood out to me was Bapak Sumadi, an entrepreneur in Indonesia, a country where 66 million people practice open defecation. Mr. Sumadi has developed an innovative business strategy around direct sales of latrines: he’s segmented his market and has priced four different levels of products (ranging from $18 – $85); he’s branded each model with a catchy name and designed them to be upgradeable; he offers flexible payment terms and after-sales services (e.g., pit-emptying). While it remains to be seen whether the model will be able to scale, it is encouraging to see promise in these enterprising, consumer-focused approaches to challenging one of the world’s biggest problems.
The conference was a valuable opportunity to identify business models and make contacts that can help us as we continue to invest in this sector.
The Ripple Effect team marked the end of the successful India phase of the project by attending and presenting at the recently concluded Water Summit 2009 conference held in New Delhi.
The summit had an excellent turnout with over 150 attendees and speakers representing multiple stakeholders from the water sector in India.These included senior representatives from the Government of India, NGOs, World Economic Forum, UNDP, USAID, SDC, private sector, as well as various State Water Boards and financial institutions.
All the presentations were very well received by the attendees, who also provided valuable feedback to us.In particular, the technology based work of Piramal and Naandi was complimented by several members of the audience.It was mentioned that while similar ideas had been implemented elsewhere, (eg. by Mother Dairy in India), this approach had not been tested in the water sector until now.One audience member commented that successful projects like they had seen within the Ripple Effect, should be linked to the public sector through policy interventions, in order to reach even greater scale.Yet another, from an international NGO, suggested starting a Ripple Effect like project in sanitation.
Jal Bhagirathi water outlet
During the pilot presentations, Jal Bhagirathi spoke of the successes it had achieved through their public-private-community partnerships model.Their reverse osmosis plant was now selling water to newly established remote water outlets, owned and managed by the community members. The project resulted in improved availability of safe drinking water while providing opportunities for livelihood generation for the women in the village.As a result of this project, the volume of water sold from their reverse osmosis plant, had increased from an average 2000 liters a day to 12,000 liters per day.The location of the outlets had resulted in reducing the distance of access to water from 2 km to under 0.5 km for the community.
