Powering Needs, Empowering Lives
Uncharted Ground With SSIR
Some 800 million people globally – as many as a quarter of them in India – have no access to electricity. Far more suffer routine brownouts and power cuts. The result puts the rural poor, who are most impacted, at a severe disadvantage in every way: Health-care services are crippled, education is compromised, and entire communities are cut off from modern industrial and digital livelihoods. In short, a key determinant of social equity goes missing. Harish Hande, an energy engineer, started SELCO in 1995 to pioneer the delivery of decentralized solar power to India’s rural...
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Healing From Trauma
Uncharted Ground With SSIR
Glasswing International teaches Latin American communities to understand and recover from the impacts of trauma induced by chronic and acute violence.
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From Plow to Prosperity
Uncharted Ground With SSIR
Babban Gona provides the capital and means to move Nigeria’s poor farmers from a life of subsistence to economic security.
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A Fair Deal for Coffee Growers
Uncharted Ground With SSIR
Vega Coffee lifts up struggling coffee growers in Latin America by enabling them to roast, package, and ship their own beans directly to US customers—and reinvents the supply chain in the process. This episode covers Vega's story.
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The Business of Water
Uncharted Ground With SSIR
Jibu franchises make clean drinking water affordable for Africa’s booming urban populations and provide economic opportunity to a new generation of entrepreneurs. Hear from the father-and-son team, Randy and Galen Welsch, who started Jibu in 2012. The social enterprise is now a leading purveyor of bottled water in four countries and growing rapidly in three more.
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A Global Movement for Environmental Justice
Uncharted Ground With SSIR
Namati provides legal knowledge to communities around the world to help them defend their land, environmental, and other civil rights against abuse by commercial and political aggressors.
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The Healing Force of Family
Uncharted Ground With SSIR
Even before the pandemic, India’s public hospitals struggled with overcrowding and stretched resources. Noora Health is helping by training family caregivers on simple medical skills to help patients recover at home. This is the second episode of a two-part series about raising the quality of health care in the developing world.
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The Videos Saving Lives in the Developing World
Uncharted Ground With SSIR
Global Health Media marries video technology with compassionate instruction to address a quality crisis in the delivery of frontline health care. This is the first episode of a two-part series about raising the quality of health care in the developing world.
info_outlineNothing is more essential to life than clean drinking water. Where it’s in short supply—as in much of Africa and other developing regions—there’s opportunity for promoting good health, improving livelihoods, and making money. Jibu seeks to achieve all three through its franchises that treat, package, and distribute affordable water in the major cities of East Africa. For Jibu, selling water is ultimately a means to the end of spreading economic opportunity for the continent’s aspiring entrepreneurs.
A father-and-son team, Randy and Galen Welsch, started Jibu in 2012. The social enterprise is now a leading purveyor of bottled water in four countries and growing rapidly in three more. This episode traces the venture from:
- their early brainstorming sessions (03:59) to the failure of their pilot project in all three initial countries (05:54),
the design of compact equipment tailored for developing markets (11:29), - their priorities on recruiting women franchisees and employees to promote gender equity (17:24),
- structuring payment terms to make the franchise opportunity affordable to African entrepreneurs (25:52),
- and empowering local owners to make decisions that are key to growth and sustainability (29:36).
Additional Resources:
Source articles for this episode include:
- Progress on Household Drinking Water, Sanitation and Hygiene, the WHO’s latest data on water access around the world.
- Africa’s Cities: Opening Doors to the World, a World Bank report on the challenges faced by the continent’s urban centers.
- Africa’s Urbanization Dynamics 2020, an analysis by the OECD of policy options for the development of African cities within their local contexts.
The full transcript of the episode can be found at https://ssir.org/podcasts/entry/the_business_of_water.