When Martin Fisher completed his doctoral degree in mechanicalengineering at the prestigious Stanford University in northern California, hehad no idea what he wanted to do with his life. All he knew was that he didn'twant to teach or work for the government or oil industry ? which is whateveryone else who graduated from his program back in 1985 was doing.
Instead,Fisher took a soul-searching trip to Peru and for the first time, really sawwhat poverty means in a developing country. He recalls, "I startedthinking maybe there's something that can be done with engineering andpoverty."
Hecame back to the United States and applied for a Fulbright Fellowship to returnto Peru. Because he didn't speak Spanish, he didn't get the fellowship. But theFulbright committee decided to send him to Kenya instead. Fisher initiallyplanned on spending just ten months there. He ended up staying for 17 years.
During his first five years, he worked for a British non-profitagency and, he says, learned a lot about what doesn't work. "One of thethings I did was establish a very large rural water program, where we went intovillages, and we would build a well and put a pump on it and get nice, cleanwater. It looks like a great project; everybody celebrates. The trouble is, youcome back a couple of years later, the pump is broken down." Although itwas a community resource, no one would take the individual responsibility forfixing it. "Africa is literally littered with tens of thousands ofbroken-down community water systems."
Theconclusion Fisher came to is that charity doesn't work ? at least not incircumstances like this. People need to feel a sense of individual ownershipover the technology that makes their lives better ? and just giving a pump toan entire group of people isn't going to do that.
Fisher says he learned another important lesson duringhis first five years in Kenya. "A poor person's number one need ? and infact their only need ? is a way to make more money. If a poor person can makemore money, they're no longer poor, they can afford education, they can affordhealthcare, they can afford clean water."
Andso with those two lessons learned, Martin Fisher and his colleague, Nick Moon,set out in 1991 to found KickStart. It's a non-profit organization thatdevelops agricultural technology that is then bought and sold by entrepreneursin Kenya and Tanzania.
The organization's biggest success story is somethingcalled the Money Maker Pump. It's a human-powered irrigation system that canpull water up from as deep as 7 meters underground ? and then irrigate onehectare of land. There's also something called the Super Money Maker Pump. It'sa little more expensive, but it can actually pull water uphill, making it idealfor steeply sloping land where the water source may be at the bottom.
"Eightypercent of the people in Africa are poor, rural farmers," Fisher observes."And the best business that they can start is to move from subsistencefarming ? where they basically wait for the rain once a year, or maybe twice ayear, and they grow a staple crop ? move away from that to commercial irrigatedfarming, where suddenly with irrigation, they can grow high-value crops likefruits and vegetables throughout the year and, most importantly, bring them outin the long dry season, when nobody else has any crops, and the prices arevery, very high."
Thepumps cost around $34 ? which is a lot of money for a poor farmer living onjust $500 a year. But the typical farmer's income increases to about $1,500 ayear after purchasing the pump, and there are also 550 local retailers inKenya, Tanzania, and Mali who are profiting off the sale of these pumps.
Martin Fisher says these farmers and retailers are no longer living justday-to-day, which he says is the definition of being out of poverty."You're no longer worried about the daily expenses, but you can actuallythink about the future. So what do people do? They send their kids on tosecondary school, on to college. They invest in other businesses; they'll buy acow and start a small dairy. We've got 10,000 families that have built newhouses. People have bought solar panels. And for the first time, like I say,they actually have the options to do those things, and they're literally out ofpoverty."
MartinFisher's KickStart program has also developed technologies for low-cost housingconstruction and cooking-oil manufacturing. All together, 64,000 new businesseshave been started in Africa thanks to KickStart, and these businesses generateabout $79 million a year in new profits and wages.