Income Is Development: KickStart's Pumps Help Kenyan Farmers Transition to a Cash Economy
Martin Fisher · Innovations Technology Governance Globalization · 2006
Within less than a generation, poor families in Africa have been thrown from essentially a subsistence lifestyle into a primarily cash-based economy.Ability to earn an income is suddenly a paramount skill.Yet approaches to encouraging development continue to be based on the assumption that the primary need of people in poor places is something other than a way to make money-better healthcare, education, water, housing, and so forth.This is misguided.Providing these will not end poverty.In a cash economy, money is the primary means to securing other vital resources.Except in a few very remote areas of the world, if you ask a person in a poor place what they need most, they will tell you that it is a way to make more money.The way to address the challenge of persistent poverty is to create sustainable income-earning opportunities for millions of people.Income is development.I am the co-founder of KickStart, a nonprofit social enterprise that has for the past fifteen years employed design principles to address the poverty challenge in Kenya and Tanzania.KickStart designs and markets low-cost pumps and other capital equipment that have been used by thousands of farmers to establish highly profitable commercial enterprises.This market-based approach to development "kick-starts" a sustainable cycle of wealth creation, brings poor people into the middle class, and eradicates the effects of poverty from the ground up.KickStart's best-selling tools are foot-powered irrigation pumps that enable poor farmers to switch from subsistence to commercial irrigated farming.With irrigation, entrepreneurial farmers can grow three or four crops of high-value crops per year, greatly increase their yields, and harvest the crops in the off-season, when the prices are highest.The average net farm income of farmers who use our pumps increases by a factor of ten-from $110 to $1,100 per year.In Africa this is a lot of money.For the first time they can afford to properly feed and educate their children, pay for healthcare and plan for their futures.To date, over 40,000 smallscale farmers and entrepreneurs in Africa are using KickStart's pumps and other technologies to run profitable small businesses.Between them they generate over $40 million per year in new profits and wages, and total revenues equivalent to over 0.5% of the GDP in Kenya, and 0.2% of the GDP in Tanzania.