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Progress Makers in Africa: How KickStart International Lifts Farmers out of Poverty

March 24, 2015

The crisis of poverty around the world impacts millions of people everyday. KickStart International, an organization founded in Kenya to enable poor rural farmers to create new viable businesses, leverages engineering, private sector distribution channels, donor funding, and a Citi line of credit to run their business.

When Martin Fisher, co-founder and CEO of KickStart International, first went to Africa in 1985, he was just a young PhD engineer looking to make an impact. What he found instead was a frustration with many development models that do not do enough to lift people out of poverty. Fisher started to think about why.

Speaking about his work to create community clean water wells, Fisher explains, "It's tragedy of the commons. Nobody owns it, nobody's going to maintain it, why should I fix it if you're going to use it?" So Fisher and his business partner, Nick Moon, launched KickStart as their solution to the systemic failures of traditional aid.

With a mission to lift millions of people in Africa out of poverty quickly, cost-effectively, and sustainably, KickStart designs and sells tools to the rural poor that give people the opportunity to improve their own lives. KickStart's business model provides a blueprint on enabling progress at the local level.

1. Identify Opportunities to Achieve the Greatest Impact

Understanding the challenges people face across Africa was the first step to discovering where they could have the largest impact. According to the FAO, approximately 80% of the continent's poor live in rural areas and depend mainly on agriculture for their food and livelihoods. And yet, most of these farmers depend on rain-fed agriculture and vast amounts of farmland is not irrigated.

"If only 4 percent of farmland is irrigated," Fisher explains, "there's a huge market potential there for irrigated farming, for increased food production, and income generation."

Identifying existing inefficiencies is a necessary first step for an organization looking to make an impact.

2. Design Practical Products to Address Market Inefficiencies

KickStart set out to design a line of MoneyMaker branded irrigation pumps—affordable, manually powered pumps that farmers could invest in at a low cost to start irrigating their land without additional dependencies.

Due to the organization's agile business model, they were able to adapt as necessary to increase production in the most efficient way to serve the greatest number of people.

3. Create Strong Partnerships to Efficiently Mass-Produce

As KickStart began to scale, a flexible cash flow to enable mass production and distribution of their pumps became an immediate need. Citi opened a $2 million line of credit in order to help the organization finance its working capital and improve the efficiency of the supply chain.

As a strategic partner, Citi enables KickStart to grow their business. "It's allowed us to have more distributors and more retailers," Fisher says, "because across the rest of Africa we sell directly to import distributors. We have to finance many of them."

4. Understand Your Unique Customer Base

Many rural farmers are risk-averse buyers that are skeptical about making big-ticket purchases, therefore KickStart must convince them that this investment is worthwhile. As a result, teams of marketing agents visit local retailers and farms to host live demos of the equipment. That way, farmers get a feel for the value of investing in a tool that will allow them to irrigate two acres of land in as little as four hours a day.

5. Measure Impact Before Shifting Business

Every business must measure success in its own way. For Fisher and his team, monitoring the impact of their interventions has been critical and proves that they are making a real and measurable difference in the lives of poor African farmers.

To date, KickStart has sold over 250,000 pumps and lifted over 830,000 people out of poverty. They are now developing a new strategic plan to lift another 1 million people out of poverty by 2021.

Poverty is by no means at an end in Africa. But organizations like KickStart, which embrace the market reality and adapt to meet the greatest needs of their customers, are the key to making significant progress.

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