Thursday, October 01, 2009

KickStart - Tools to end poverty


KickStart, a San Francisco-based non profit that was co-founded by Nick Moon and Martin Fisher, provides a solution for millions of Africans. They encourage rural entrepreneurship by providing tools that Africa's poor can afford. Founded in 1991, it has developed a machine to make building blocks, a press that extracts cooking oil from seeds, a hay baler and a series of hand operated micro-irrigation pumps. Their latest invention, the MoneyMaker hip pump can help farmers get a return on their $34 investment within three months. Farmers can now make more money working in the farms then working in the cities. The company has sold more than 63,000 pumps and has generated $45 million in profits and wages in Kenya, Mali, and Tanzania. Over the next three years, KickStart expects to expand into three more countries, sell 125,000 more pumps, roll out a new invention called the "deep-lift irrigation pump" that can pull water from 60ft underground and bring 400,000 more people out of poverty.

Chris Kuntze

Source: KickStart