"The biggest need of the poor is a way to make money." That simple premise of Martin Fisher's led him to create a unique approach that is lifting rural Africans out of poverty. The British-born, Stanford-educated engineer is a co-founder of KickStart, one of the first social enterprises the Case Foundation chose to support.

After observing the limitations of traditional nonprofit approaches, Martin and his partner Nick Moon decided to give rural Africans the information and tools they needed to start profitable businesses. Applying his engineering background, Martin developed low-cost irrigation tools that are now turning poor yet enterprising Africans into business people.

Is it working? More than 42,000 new micro-enterprises have been started in East Africa using KickStart equipment, and 800 more are started each month. Together, they generate more than $42 million per year in new profits and wages and their revenues are equivalent to over 0.5 percent of Kenya's GDP, and 0.25 percent of Tanzania's GDP.

Since 1991, the unique KickStart approach has helped over 200,000 people find an escape from poverty. Martin aims to double that number in the next three years. With his enterprising attitude and innovative technologies, we have no doubt he will achieve that goal.

Q + A with Jean Case

JEAN CASE: First of all, what is KickStart, and what does it intend to do?

 

MARTIN FISHER: KickStart is a social enterprise with a mission to change the way the world fights poverty. Our approach is to design, market, and sell simple tools that poor entrepreneurs buy and use to create profitable new small businesses and earn a decent income.

 

JEAN: How do your products create businesses?

 

MARTIN: In Africa, 80 percent of the poor people are farmers, and a poor farmer really only has two assets -- a small plot of land, often with eight or nine people living on a half acre or an acre of land, and one basic skill, which is farming. Our tools, like the best-selling MoneyMaker pump, help farmers use those two assets to create businesses. Instead of subsistence farming...