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, where they grow one or two crops a year and wait for the rain to grow the crops, the MoneyMaker pump helps them do commercial irrigated farming, where they can have at least three or four crop cycles throughout the year.  They grow high-value fruits and vegetables instead of subsistence crops.  They can get high yields, and best of all, they can bring the crops out in the dry season when there is no other produce on the market, so they can make a lot of money.

 

JEAN:  Can you describe the device itself?

 

MARTIN:  Our pumps fill an important need.  Large-scale farmers have fancy irrigation systems, but for the small farmer, there was really no technology.  A petrol pump is too expensive, and there's no petrol, and none of them have electricity, so electric pumps don't work either.  We designed a line of manually operated irrigation pumps that work like little Stairmaster machines.  You just walk back and forth to pump the water, and you can spray it through a hose.

 

These are called MoneyMaker Pumps because a poor person only cares about one thing -- making money -- and we have three different models of the pump right now.  One retails at $95, one at $65, and the new one we just introduced retails at $33.  When a farmer buys one of these, they start irrigating, and on average, they increase their net farm income from an average of $110 a year to $1,100 a year.

 

And this literally lifts them from below the poverty line into the middle class, because for the first time, they have enough money to pay for the basics.  They can have enough food to eat, they can have decent shelter, they can educate their kids, and they have a little money left over to plan their future and do something else with.

 

JEAN:  So the goal of KickStart is not just to provide water to rural families, but to really improve their lives.  Is that right?

 

MARTIN:  Exactly.  When it comes down to it, I believe the biggest need of the poor in any part of the world is a way to make money.  Poor people everywhere in the world today live in a cash economy, and people need to make money for everything.  They need money for food, clothes, shelter, fuel, clean water, education, and health care.  And the fact is that if they don't have a way to make money, they can't survive.  And there are very, very few jobs in Africa.  In Kenya, only 7 percent of the labor force is actually employed by the formal private sector; in Tanzania, only 3 percent.

 

JEAN:  Where did the idea for KickStart come from?

 

MARTIN:  I went to Africa on a Fulbright scholarship to study the appropriate technology movement.  I was supposed to be there for 10 months and stayed for 17 years.  I joined ActionAid, where I met my partner Nick Moon.  Together we established the largest rural water program in East Africa and developed and ran a lot of other programs and projects.  But the experience of working for a traditional nonprofit in Kenya led to a growing frustration with the lack of impacts and the lack of sustainability of virtually everything we were doing and everything that traditional development was about.  So Nick and I came up with the concept of what we thought had to be done to make things work.

 

We realized that one big problem is that coming up with a new business idea and a way to make money is difficult for a poor person.  They can't do market research.  They don't have TV.  Even if they do come up with an idea, they can't access the tools and equipment they need.  What's missing is equipment that's affordable and profitable -- which is sadly lacking not just in Africa, but around the world.

 

The way it works is we identify what can be really profitable businesses for thousands and thousands of people to start, where they can make their investment back in three to six months.  Then we design affordable tools and equipment, and establish a private-sector supply chain -- with the goal of making the equipment available in every village, every town, every city in the local retail shops.

 

JEAN:  How do people find out about your products?

 

MARTIN:  We have to stand up and tell them, "Hey, you want to get out of poverty?  You can go down to your local shop, buy this new equipment, and start a business." We do mass marketing, and we do live demonstrations.  We put billboards up.  We use radio advertisements, and we use newspapers and every way we can to reach the people and say, "This is a good business, and people just like you have been really successful.  You can be too."

 

JEAN:  Where did you start deploying the pumps, and where are you today?

 

MARTIN:  Most of our pumps have been sold in Kenya and Tanzania.  The first pump we brought out could pull water out of a well and dump it into a channel for irrigation, and we sold about 4,000 or 5,000 of those, but we soon realized that the farmers in Kenya wanted a pressurized irrigation pump that could actually push water up a hill and allow them to spray it onto their crops.  So we introduced a pressurized irrigation pump, and we've sold close to 60,000 of these, and about 45,000 of them are being actively used to run successful farming businesses.  Then we tried to replicate the business in Tanzania, which is right next to Kenya, but it is a very different country.  People told us it would never work in Tanzania because they thought Tanzanians lacked the entrepreneurial drive to make it happen.  But we found a tremendous entrepreneurial spirit in Tanzania, and sales grew faster than they had in Kenya.

 

Last year, we went to Mali in West Africa -- again, a completely different place.  It was our first effort in Francophone West Africa.  It's a very different village structure and farming structure, but we discovered that it's working there very, very well also.

 

JEAN:  Where else do you plan to take your product?

 

MARTIN:  Well, our pumps can be used in virtually all the Sub-Saharan countries, and we want to go to at least three new countries in the next three years, and we're considering Ghana in West Africa and Malawi, Uganda, Rwanda, Zambia, Mozambique, and Ethiopia in East Africa.  We have to be a little bit opportunistic about where the donors are eager for us to go, but we are confident that we can go to any of those places, and eventually we want to go to all of them.  But its more than just the product -- we want to replicate the KickStart model in each of these countries, because it's the private sector supply chain that makes it sustainable.

 

JEAN:  I'm sure you're familiar with the raging debate around whether the best way to address development needs in Africa is to do so through services provided at no cost to the residents or through services in which residents play some role in paying for what they are getting.  I've heard you say that you've run into people who actually think "profit" is a dirty word.

 

MARTIN:  It comes down to this: Do we want to create dignity or dependence?  We've heard the arguments on both sides of this issue, and we believe very strongly that people should pay for things, and there's a couple of reasons for that.

 

First, for all of us, if we pay for something, we value it that much more, and we're more likely to make good use of it.  You know, if you get a present, you may put it away in a drawer.  If you go out and buy something, you're much more likely to use it and take care of it.  People want to think that poor people are somehow difference in this regard, but they are not.

 

Second, I believe that giving things away is inherently unfair.  How do you decide who you are going to give it to?  Who makes that decision, and why should one person or village get something valuable and not another person or village? 

 

Third, giving things away is not sustainable.  We want to leave in place a purely profitable supply chain where 10 years from now people can go down to the local shop, buy an irrigation pump, and get spare parts and accessories.  If everybody in the supply chain makes money, then our pumps will continue to be available.  If we were to give our pumps away, the minute we left, nobody could ever get one again.  No one could get the spare parts or accessories.  These villages and these farmers would be no better off for our efforts.

 

I think when somebody buys something, it's a matter of their own dignity.  If you give somebody something, they sort of lose that dignity, and instead they become dependent.  So, even from a personal point of view, for the poor farmer, they are going to feel much better about something if they went out and paid their money for it and worked hard to make it happen.

 

JEAN:  Steve and I had the pleasure and the privilege of seeing your MoneyMaker Pump and actually operating it on some farms in Kenya, and we saw firsthand how your technology and your approach had changed lives.  What are some of your favorite success stories?

 

MARTIN:  It always comes down to the individual family stories that bring tears to my eyes every time I hear them, even though they are happening every day.  For example, let me just tell you a story about one of our new farmers.  We have a new $33 pump that we call a Hip Pump because you operate it by sort of dancing, rocking back and forth with your hips.  We interviewed farmers who had used that pump, and we discovered that in just the first three months, the farmers had made an average of $125 in new profits -- so they had paid for the pump and were on their way to having a successful business.

 

One of the farmers we met was a young man named Felix.  He has a wife and two kids and lives in rural Kenya.  But he owned no land and there was no work for him, so he left his family and went to Nairobi to work as a food server in an informal restaurant in one of the slums.  He made about $30 or $40 a month and sent whatever he could to his wife and kids.  But when he learned about our pump, he thought maybe he could make more money back in the rural area.  So he saved his money and bought a Hip Pump and went back home.   He rented six small plots of land -- a total of one acre -- and he and his wife used the pump to grow French beans, tomatoes, and baby corn.  After three months, he did his first harvest on three of the plots and made a $580 profit.  That was only half his harvest.  I'm sure if we went and visited him now, we'd see that he's made well over $1,000.  His dream is to be able to buy a plot of land and build a house for his family, and he's well on his way.

 

JEAN:  What are your biggest challenges with this social enterprise?

 

MARTIN:  What we really want to do is take this to a much larger scale.  In the next three years, we want to get 400,000 people out of poverty, and in the following three years, a million more people out of poverty.  We're also going to develop new technologies and start selling many more pumps to other development agencies and NGOs around the world, and we've already started doing quite a bit of that.  To be honest, our biggest challenge right now is to raise the money to meet those goals.  We just started a $19 million campaign in order to make this happen. 

 

JEAN:  You live in the United States, in San Francisco.  Is that right?

 

MARTIN:  That's right.

 

JEAN:  But you manage a staff of 200 people or more in three African countries.  So how does this work where you live in the U.S. and you manage an effort in Africa?  How do you lead an international team to success?

 

MARTIN:  It's clearly a big challenge, and I think we're lucky that Nick and I started KickStart as equal partners.  I left Africa to be the CEO over here, in charge of raising money and new business development, while Nick is the COO in Africa.  He's really in charge of the day-to-day affairs of what's happening in Kenya, Tanzania, and Mali.  Nick and I are on the phone on a regular basis, though it's difficult because we are almost 12 hours apart.  My daytime is his nighttime, so we rely a lot of e-mails back and forth, and I try to get to Kenya at least twice a year.

 

JEAN:  You talked about running a social enterprise, and a social enterprise at the end of the day is just a for-profit mission, right?  Where is your passion?  Is it more to have a successful profit-making business, or the mission side of what you do, and how do you sort of see those two things going together?

 

MARTIN:  My passion is certainly the mission, and as a social enterprise, we have to be mission-led, and our mission is to get as many people out of poverty as quickly and cost-effectively as we possibly can.  It turns out that the best way to do that is to be as much like a business as we possibly can.  The more pumps we sell, the more people are going to get out of poverty.  So we always have to keep both things in mind, but Nick and I are not driven by making money for ourselves because, believe me, we're not.  However, we want to leave in place a sustainable solution, and to be sustainable, everyone in the supply chain has to make money -- from the farmers to the retailers and manufacturers.

 

JEAN:  Thank you for taking the time to talk about your exciting work.

 

MARTIN:  Thank you.