Engineer of the Year Martin Fisher's human-powered irrigation pumps lift both water and standards of living....... Joseph Ogando, Senior Editor -- Design News, September 22, 2008
KickStart Co-Founder Martin Fisher Receives $100,000 Lemelson-MIT
Award for Sustainability
Martin Fisher has been awarded the 2008 Lemelson-MIT Award for Sustainability <http://mit.edu/invent/a-award.html> , for his efforts to transform the lives of poor African farmers through technological invention and business development.
Created in 1994 by Jerome H. Lemelson, one of America’s most prolific inventors, and his wife Dorothy, the Lemelson-MIT Program recognizes outstanding inventors; encourages sustainable new solutions to real-world problems; and inspires young people to pursue invention.
As co-founder and CEO of the nonprofit social enterprise KickStart <http://www.kickstart.org/> , Fisher develops and markets moneymaking tools such as low-cost, human-powered irrigation pumps.
”Most development agencies see the poor as victims needing help,” Fisher explained. “At KickStart, we see them as hardworking entrepreneurs seeking the opportunity to get out of poverty.”
At present, nearly 62,000 small-scale farmers and entrepreneurs in Kenya, Tanzania and Mali are running profitable businesses by using MoneyMaker pumps. On average, farmers double or triple their annual net household incomes. Current pump users generate total new revenues equivalent to 0.6 percent of Kenya’s GDP, and 0.25 percent of Tanzania’s GDP.
”The MoneyMaker pumps Martin designed are inspirational on many levels,” said David M. Kelley, IDEO chairman. “They are an exceedingly simple solution to a very complex problem.”
KickStart is an award winning non-profit,
social enterprise that has already taken over 300,000 people in Africa
out of poverty. KickStart does this by designing and mass-marketing
very low cost tools and equipment that are bought by poor families and
used to establish highly profitable small businesses.
Establish in July 1991 by Nick Moon and Martin Fisher, KickStart
was founded in Kenya as an international social enterprise.
KickStart
has offices in Kenya, Tanzania, and Mali. We have engineers and
technicians that design and develop our award winning products. We also
employ trainers and promoters to explain the benefits of our products
to
our customers.
KickStart's unique model developed in Kenya
is now being replicated in other African countries. We established
an ambitious goal to expand our program in East Africa and open new
programs in Southern and West Africa to help millions more people out
of poverty.
KickStart's
market and private-sector oriented approach ensures that the impacts of
its program become fully self-sustaining in local economies.
Technologies are installed in the private sector and continue to be
produced, marketed, and used by entrepreneurs to create thousands of
vibrant new businesses and jobs, long after KickStart's interventions
have ceased.
KickStart’s best selling tools are its human powered, “MoneyMaker” irrigation pumps that enable poor farmers to move from subsistence farming – where they wait for the rain to grow one or two crop cycles per year – to irrigated agriculture, where they grow and sell high value fruits and vegetables all year long. KickStart’s $98 and $35 pumps are operated like small stair-master machines and can pull water from wells as deep as 28 feet, and spray it through a hose pipe to irrigate as much as 2 acres of land. Farmers who use these easy to maintain pumps, on average increase their family incomes by a factor of 3 to 4. For the first time, they can properly feed, clothe and educate their children, build new houses, invest in new businesses opportunities and plan for a better future.
Martin is the co-founder of KickStart, an award-winning organization which has helped over 315,000 people escape poverty permanently. He and Nick Moon created an innovative approach to fighting poverty that brings together the power of technology and the entrepreneurial spirit of the worlds poor.
After receiving his Ph.D. in engineering from Stanford, he won a Fulbright Fellowship to study the Appropriate Technology Movement in Kenya. A ten-month fellowship turned into seventeen years of fighting poverty in Africa. The lessons about what works—and what does not—formed the foundation of KickStart.
Martin led a team of designers and engineers to create a number of money-making tools. The most successful have been KickStart’s MoneyMaker irrigation pumps, with almost 100,000 sold to date. Individually, users of KickStart’s pumps see an average ten-fold increase in farm income. Combined, users of KickStart tools are generating over $74 million in new profits and wages each year.
Martin is frequent conference presenter on topics of social entrepreneurship, design, poverty, water, and related issues.
He serves on the Board of BuildChange, and the advisory boards of the XPrize and the Global Social Benefit Incubator at Santa Clara University.
Martin was awarded the 2008 Lemelson MIT Award for Sustainability. He is also a Skoll Social Entrepreneur, Schwab Outstanding Social Entrepreneur, a Beacon Fellow (UK), and one of TIME magazine’s “European Heroes.”
Business model
KickStart designs the pumps and sells them through a network of over 500 local retail shops in the countries where it works. It then uses donor funds to widely promote and market the pumps to poor, but entrepreneurial, farmers. Once the pumps become well known and commonly used, KickStart will leave in place a fully sustainable supply chain that continues to sell them to farmers on a purely profitable basis – enabling millions more people to escape poverty. KickStart will then continue to develop and promote new MoneyMaking technologies in new countries.
Competitive advantage
To date over 60,000 families in Africa have used KickStart technologies to escape from poverty, and every $250 donated to KickStart enables another family to get out of poverty forever.
Martin Fisher
Houria Nefertari
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