We are all creatures of habit, especially when it involves handling problems. Some people repeat conscious or unconscious patterns of making problems, others are good at avoiding or grappling with issues that appear in their lives and businesses, and there also are a couple of that have unique innate instincts for solving whatever might come their way. The latter springs to my mind as I hear Sunil Lalvani, founding father of Project Maji, a Dubai-based social enterprise that deploys solar-pumping technology across Sub-Saharan Africa to supply sustainable clean water access to rural communities.
Lalvani tells me that it had been in 2014, when he witnessed Ghanaian children collecting dirty water from roadside puddles, that he took take a career-changing (and indeed, life-changing) decision for himself. That was when, after 20 years at his family’s electronics business, Binatone, Lalvani decided to seem into why 785 million people -as per the Joint monitor program for water system and Sanitation by WHO and UNICEF- lack access to a basic beverage source.
This a part of the story saw us talking about the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and particularly about Goal 6 (ending the worldwide water crisis and reaching everyone with clean water, sanitation and hygiene) of its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). I even have learnt that the planet Bank estimates that achieving the Goal 6 targets is predicted to cost approximately US$114 billion a year until 2030, while the Official Development Assistance, which is defined by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development as a government aid that promotes and specifically targets the economic development and welfare of developing countries, allocates just alittle a part of it- around $13 billion a year.
According to the Joint monitor program for water system and Sanitation by WHO and UNICEF 785 million people lack access to a basic beverage source.
Source: Project Maji
In any case, Lalvani assures me that “everybody during this space knows that we’re not getting to get anywhere on the brink of complete water coverage by 2030,” and that i get my first hint of his problem-solving skills, with him not mincing words when describing the difficulty , and explaining what must be done to beat it. “The problem, which i buy very frustrated about, is that even the numbers that get thrown around are wrong,” Lalvani explains. “The UN says that we'd like trillions of dollars per annum for subsequent 10 years to unravel the SDGs, and while I don’t realize other SDGs, i do know that the water problem is solvable in our lifetime. For that, we'd like the proper business models and therefore the right funding. there's huge corruption during this space. i used to be in government tenders in some countries, and since our solution costs $15,000 and not 3 times that, a government employee I spoke to wasn’t even interested to ask subsequent question, probably worried that we might be taking a neighborhood of his income away. So, the matter isn't insurmountable, it's solvable. Also, it’s not a technical problem, but purely financial, and it's to be approached within the right way.”
So, how has Lalvani received a possible solution? Firstly, he developed the Project Maji solar-powered water kiosk, which may be installed wherever underground water is out there . it's an economical , scalable, and measurable solution that pumps 5,000 liters of water per day with no electricity grid. during a nutshell, Lalvani’s approach was to (i) invest his time, money, and expertise, (ii) reiterate the answer as repeatedly as required , and (iii) be unapologetic about the solution’s high-quality standards, especially thanks to the mission it's alleged to serve.
“I’m an enormous believer within the minimum viable product (MVP),” Lalvani explains. “In December 2014, I got the primary team together to figure thereon in Dubai, and that we came up with an engineering masterpiece. We built it, and it worked, on the other hand we realized that we had completely overengineered it, because we were sitting in Dubai during a room . After our team had gone to Africa, sat there, and observed how people used it, we completely re-engineered it, because we had to form sure that it had been affordable, but quite anything, that it had been completely reliable. There’s no shortcut in terms of watching the purchasers , so we might sit within the village, and watch people come up to our kiosk, what time they were collecting water, what proportion of it, and so on. that's not a mindset that a non-governmental organization (NGO) would have. My father’s vision of quality first has been drilled into me from day one, and although in consumer electronics there have always had to be some tradeoffs that are being fixed by our service centers, with Project Maji, when I’m providing water to a village which is their life source, not one thing can fail .”
In a little quite five years, Project Maji has provided over 50,000 Ghanaians and Kenyans with sustainable access to safe beverage , pumping over 90 million liters per annum in over 50 sites. For his work, Lalvani has recently been awarded the Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Global Water Award, and was also been selected together of the 14 honorees from round the world for the 2020 Young Presidents’ Organization’s Global Impact Award. The Project Maji team targets rural communities that have a maximum of 1,000 people, because those are often overlooked by governments and other NGOs.
However, Project Maji’s plans are big, including scaling the program to additional countries (starting with India this year), and Lalvani’s vision is to succeed in a million people by 2025. “In this space, I saw two things that were wrong,” Lalvani says. “One, people were still building handpumps, which is an ancient technology. we've no right to offer villages a handpump. Not only because it requires a physical pumping, but because it's hugely unreliable as the other mechanical product. Even the simplest pump goes to interrupt . Then, if it breaks, they assume that the village will fix it, but nobody goes back and checks. People build schools or hospitals and walk off . They don’t roll in the hay with a nasty heart, but also with no long-term understanding of the matter . The principle of building something and giving it to the people within the area is sweet , but these people need more help, guidance, and support.”
The reason behind numerous broken and abandoned hand pumps across the African continent lies within the incontrovertible fact that a standard charity model isn't compatible for tackling this issue long-term. This brings us to the second innovation Lalvani has been trying to introduce within the non-profit model. When it involves the upkeep costs for its kiosks, Project Maji operates with an ongoing revenue stream, since its business model encompasses working with village communities to work out an enjoyable , nominal fee for the water via mobile money. This provides each community with a secure maintenance fund, while a built-in, remote monitoring system ensures all Project Maji sites are truly sustainable, with tangible and measurable impact.
“My original model was to boost capital, build the sites, charge for the water, and then, the cash from the water revenue would buy the upkeep costs, and repay the hardware cost over a period of eight to 12 years,” Lalvani says. “But I approached friends and family first, and what was interesting was that tons of them came back saying that they didn't understand that ‘investment thing.’ they might say, ‘What you’re doing should be charity, no? I’ll offer you money, but I’m unsure about investing.’ Then, I visited impact investors, and that they all loved what we were doing, but said that our financial returns weren't fantastic. However, we sell water to villages, and that we need to cap our revenue, so there's a maximum that we will sell, $2 cents per 20 litre, and our revenue is capped. the very fact that we will make a return is really specialized , but investors had to return with the proper mindset. So, i used to be stuck between friends and family who wanted to donate but to not invest, and investors who wanted higher returns.”
Lalvani explains that his two main targets for seeking finance are family offices and therefore the private sector. Although there's a growing number of family foundations already engaged in impact investing in some form (more than 1 / 4 of family foundations are now, consistent with a 2019 Global Family Office report from UBS and Campden Research), a number of those Lalvani has encountered might be more flexible and innovative when making investing decisions, he feels. “I sat with some senior bankers during this space to know what this is often about, and tons of it's about asset allocation,” Lalvani says.
“Let’s take a typical family office where you'll have an amount that you simply will split into different investments, then you'll have your 10% leftover for philanthropic initiatives. the matter today is that impact investing space is competing for money with private equity and risk capital , where they're trying to find multiple times returns. If you attend a family office and say, ‘I’ve got subsequent Uber,’ or ‘I’ve got this water development beginning of Africa.’ Then, they say, ‘You will get 10x your money if the Silicon Valley thing rockets, otherwise you might get your money and a 20% thereon from Africa.’ So, it’s a no brainer , right? But what if you change that impact investing formula to require money for social enterprises from philanthropic funds, saying that you simply can divulge a million to philanthropy and obtain nothing, or that you simply can provides it to those guys [sustainable social entrepreneurs] who will make this measurable impact, and you’ll get the cash again, and you'll provides it again? That’s how i would like to vary the paradigm.”
When it involves working with commercial entities, Lalvani explains that his team targets the companies’ CSR and marketing budgets. One successful cooperation he mentions is with retailer Aldo in Dubai, which donates one dirham for every of its shoe accessory sales to the present cause. However, the most challenge, Lalvani says, comes from how impact investing is defined. “There are so-called three brackets of impact investments,” he says. “One of them, to me, is basically cheating, because it’s once you invest in any huge company, and say that, since the corporate employs 15,000 people, you're making an impression . i feel that’s a touch of a stretch, but some people do that. subsequent big bracket is what they call ESG (environment, social, governance) investing. That’s a true thing, except for me, that ought to even be considered normal investing, and not this special ESG bracket, because I classify that as a ‘do no evil’ approach. If you're not burning the environment, you’re just doing normal business. If you set women on your board, you’re doing what you ought to be doing. The third one is to try to to good, actively. So, let’s find a social challenge that has not been addressed and since of which individuals are suffering, but my point is that this is often where you are doing need to measure returns. In doing that, however, we've the traditional return of investment (ROI), which, for any social enterprise, is 5% or 10 or 20% return over a period of your time , but we try to push for SROI (social ROI) where you check out the entire impact cost of what’s been done. By giving these villages water, children can attend school, women can work, less money is spent on medicine and hospitals, and therefore the whole area prospers. All of that's an ROI. the purpose is that the village goes to urge the return, not you, in order that are often seen as a philanthropic donation.”
Follow Us
Stay updated via social channels