My name is Silviano Valdez and I am a sophomore at Earlham College and a Bonner Scholar intern at Right Sharing of World Resources. I spent this summer with ThinkImpact, a program that teaches graduate and undergraduate students about social entrepreneurship in rural parts of Africa. With a colleague from ThinkImpact I started social business called Vuwa (water in Swahili) Enterprise in a small eastern Kenyan village. The project was heavily influenced by what I have learned interning with Right Sharing of World Resources. As in micro-finance, Vuwa Enterprise is able to make its service and products affordable through financing.
Vuwa Enterprise installs water catchments and storage systems on tin roof houses in areas subject to drought. For $20 Vuwa is able to install a 10-foot gutter system and 100-liter storage tank, and can educate a family about the prevention of waterborne diseases. In eastern Kenya women sometimes spend their whole day walking miles, carrying 20 liter jugs of water on their heads. When I was in the village of Chanagande the nearest wells ran dry twice, and the women had to walk even further. I wrote in my journal, “ I don’t know what is worse, seeing these women’s tired faces, or knowing that the water they were working so hard to take back to their families could causes diseases like typhoid or cholera.”
Vuwa’s rain catchments system and the Water Diseases Prevention Training helps families overcome these social challenges. However $20 is too expensive for Kenyans, who are living in poverty, unless the product is financed over 6 months. Therefore, we established a repayment plan and revolving loan system. After the installation of our product, a loan officer picks up a customer’s small weekly payment. In addition, the loan officer will provide a 6-month supply of Waterguard, and teach families how to use this water treatment which prevents waterborne diseases. The idea is that a family will continue to use this locally accessible treatment after our training and will be able to witness the change in their health.
Right Sharing of World Resources helped me realize the power of affordable financing for the poor. Even the poorest or the poor can afford to pay off a loan over a period of time. Instead of financing products, Right Sharing of World Resources helps finance women’s loans to start micro businesses. These businesses empower women, and tackle poverty by increasing income. This is possible because of people who are willing to take a chance on lending to the poor, who have been traditionally been perceived as too risky an investment. Right Sharing of World Resources has been committed to changing this view for the past 30 years and believes that economic empowerment of the poor through micro-credit has enormous potential to create positive social change.
I feel that Vuwa Enterprise is building off the model of Right Sharing Of World Resources. By giving the poor the ability to obtain credit they will increase access to tools to tackle social issues that effect their lives, such as access to healthy water supplies. Vuwa Enterprise’s model has taught me that the change-makers can use this model not only to help solve issues of water, but other types of global development issues. Hopefully as time goes by we will see more and more social business and non-profits using creative financing as tool a to overcome some of the greatest challenges that our generation faces today.
