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"From Stanford Engineering to Social Innovation"

An Interview with Martin Fisher,
Founder of ApproTEC / KickStart

(First appeared in The Stanford Daily, 5/17/2005)

Can a water pump help alleviate poverty? Our social innovator of the week, Martin Fisher, has spent the last fifteen years showing the world that it can. In 1991, Martin Fisher and Nick Moon founded ApproTEC, a non-profit organization that develops technologies for alleviating poverty. Over 36,000 farmers in Kenya have now used their low-cost water pumps to create their own small businesses. Before founding ApproTEC, now known as KickStart, Martin Fisher earned his PhD in engineering from Stanford.

The Daily: What’s the big idea behind ApproTEC?

Martin Fisher: ApproTEC is all about enabling poor people to make enough money to actually escape poverty. We do this by developing and mass marketing very low-cost capital equipment that people can buy and use to start profitable businesses.

The Daily: Your most popular products are water pumps. How can they alleviate poverty?

Martin Fisher: We work in Africa, where 80% of poor people are farmers. These farmers have one asset, a small plot of land, and one basic skill, farming. The best business opportunity for them is to move from subsistence farming into farming cash crops.

Our manual irrigation pumps enable farmers to do exactly that. On average, when a farmer uses our pumps, he increases his income from $110 per year to over $1100 per year. In Africa, that brings him from below the poverty line into the middle class.

The Daily: Why help the poor start private businesses? Why not provide direct aid?

Martin Fisher: Our mission is to enable millions of families to escape from poverty. When we’re talking about poverty we’re talking about a lack of a way to make money.

We define poverty in a way that is very different from how people traditionally would. Traditionally, people talk about poverty as lack of clean water, lack of healthcare, lack of schooling, and etc.

But the bottom line is that nearly everyone in the world lives in a cash economy. If you have a way to make money, then you can afford all those other things.

The Daily: You’re critical of much of international development work. What’s the problem?

Martin Fisher: One thing about development is that there seems to be a very short institutional memory. We really need to go back and learn the lessons of the past, because I see the same mistakes made again.

Right now, we are back to thinking we can fly into a village and bring some piece of equipment, make it community owned, and make a difference. That just won’t work.

Development is generally all about giving things away to communities and doing social engineering. We’ve realized it’s much better to sell things to individual people, using the existing private sector.

The Daily: How do you use the private sector in your own work?

Martin Fisher: In our supply chain, everybody makes money. We have big manufacturers who mass produce the pump equipment. We have wholesalers who make money selling it. We have 250 retail shops, in every little village, town, and city in Kenya. They all make money.

It’s a completely sustainable supply chain. When we walk away from it, people will be able to go back and get spare parts, and get new equipment.

The Daily: You received a PhD in engineering from Stanford. How did you end up as a social entrepreneur?

Martin Fisher: After earning my doctorate, I went down to Peru on a vacation. That was my first experience being face to face with real poverty.

As an engineer, I just remember thinking that there has to be something we can do to change such a situation. I started researching the “appropriate technologies” movement in Kenya. I was supposed to go for 10 months, but I ended up staying for 17 years.

In 1991, I started ApproTEC with Nick Moon. It wasn’t until 2000 that we had a real, tested, scalable model. Now we want to take 400,000 people out of poverty in the next few years.

The Daily: Do you have any advice for students who are inspired by your work?

Martin Fisher: Right now, it’s most important to prove these models can work. We need more appropriate technology models that work, are cost-effective, and show sustainable impacts. In order to do this, people need to be very entrepreneurial and willing not to make a lot of money. It’s hard work to go out there and make it happen.

But once we do that, then we can actually start to eradicate poverty for a change.

Wow, great interview. How can I read them all?

All the interviews with outstanding social entrepreneurs and articles have been collected into a report on social innovation. It is available below for easy reading, printing, and sharing.

The Story of Social Innovation:
Interviews with Social Entrepreneurs