“Hope all is well with you! It has been awhile since my last message (see below) and wanted to give you a quick update on our very encouraging progress with the launch of our Jibu water pilot franchises.
Galen and I are heading back to Africa right now and will be staying until about mid-April to help launch 4-5 new businesses to test our concept in DR Congo, Uganda and Burundi. We are anticipating that all of these businesses will begin selling water during our trip- a nice milestone! We will also be visiting Rwanda and Kenya on this trip with the possibility of launching businesses later this year in those countries too.
There have been many challenges to overcome and lots of hard work, but we are extremely encouraged about the path we are on. Many complex logistics must come together properly and in a timely way that is specific to each location (and there is still this kind of risk in some of our locations even as head out). Quite an operational task for all concerned, especially with the 9-10 hour time difference and many communication challenges. We thought this was going to be hard- and it is! However we have been fortunate to receive lots of amazing affirmation at almost every turn that encourages us that we are ‘catching the wave’ right in terms of our strategy, decision-making, and timing.
One thing that has become even more clear to us is that our end goal is not ’sustainability’. It seems to us that aid-dependent sustainability as a goal would not sufficiently drive the motivated ownership needed on the ground to drive long term success of our model. Of course there will always be a need for aid in certain situations, but we think our model requires a different foundational approach to be successful.
So instead of sustainability, we are shooting for ‘self-propagation’ which we think is a better concept that captures our key success criteria: launching businesses that have the seeds of rapid growth built into its DNA based on proven business models that better align all of the partner/investor interests. In our case, this alignment is shared economic and social impact incentives between all stakeholders. If we accomplish that, sustainability is a foregone conclusion. Western investors, entrepreneurs on the ground, operators serving customers, and all the other stakeholders sharing similar risk/reward growth incentives, motivated by both profit and charity- that is our hope.
After all, what business in the West starts out with sustainability as the end goal? Isn’t the goal and hope always growth based on built-in profitability that can propel that growth, i.e., self-propagation? Why would we think sharp folks in the developing world would want anything different? Seems pretty simple and obvious to us now, but it wasn’t this clear in our minds when we first started. At least this is what we are attempting to validate through our pilots- we will find out soon enough if we are correct or not!
If you want to follow our progress, we post regularly (and in near real-time when on trips) through Facebook and Twitter, the links to which you can find in the upper right corner of our website.
You also may be interested in a recent interview I did with CEO Global [See post]
Warmly,
Randy Welsch”
