Clean Water For All

It’s with great pride that I announce Life Force Kiosks recently celebrated its 1 year anniversary!  During our first year, we’ve purified over 580,000 liters of water and cleaned nearly 4,500 storage containers.   We’ve also been publicly recognized by Stanford University and PATH (links to these case studies to follow shortly).  I’m extremely grateful for our tremendous Kenyan management team, our kiosk vendors, my advisers, and all the donors who made this possible.

Now that we’ve proven the efficacy and consumer acceptance of the model, the coming year will focus on expansion.  We’re currently trying to raise funding that would allow us to grow from 10 vendors to 50.  If successful, we’d aim to purify about 8,000 liters of water per day, or almost 3 Million liters per year.

I look forward to sharing more stories from the field and hopefully some new pictures over the coming weeks and months.  I encourage you to subscribe to this blog if you haven’t already to get e-mail updates.  As always, you can make a donation to support this amazing organization at http://www.LifeForceKiosks.org.  100% of donations go directly to operating costs, and all donations are tax deductible.   Thank you so much for your support, and congratulations to everyone involved with Life Force Kiosks on its first birthday.

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Life Force Kiosks just completed its fifth month of live operations and we continue to see fantastic results.  I was pleased with our first month’s performance of purifying 20,000 liters of water.  However, that number pales in comparison to this month’s outstanding result of 55,000 liters of drinking water purified.  Since launching in late May, we’ve cleaned over 200,000 liters of drinking water!  We’ve also performed 2,230 water storage container cleanings.

While Steve, Freddy, and I are very pleased with the impact we’re making in Kibera, we’re hungry for more.  We’re currently looking for funding opportunities that will allow us to expand the number of vendors offering our services.  It will not be operationally difficult for us to double or even triple the number of vendors in our network.  I’m confident that doubling the number of vendors will more than double the amount of water we can purify, as our expansion will give our organization even more credibility and convince some skeptics to give us a try.  Plus, the more people in a given social circle adopt a product, the more social pressure holdouts start to feel to join in.

If you would like to make a tax-deductible donation and help give the people of Kibera access to clean drinking water, please visit www.LifeForceKiosks.org.  As always, we appreciate your support.  It really does make a difference.

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Month 1 of Life Force Kiosks is in the books, and I’m excited about our results so far.  In just our first month, we have purified over 20,000 liters of drinking water and cleaned over 330 storage containers.  Considering this is a brand new service and several vendors took a few weeks before they really started to actively promote our services, I’d say this is a great start. 

We’re currently averaging between 1,000 and 1,500 liters of drinking water purified per day, and I hope to see that number continue to rise over time.  But even at our current volumes, we’re on track to grow over 50% from month 1 to 2 and purify over 30,000 liters of water. 

I again want to recognize and congratulate Steve, Freddy, and our vendor network for an outstanding job right out of the gate.  Clearly the community appreciates their efforts as well.

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Life Force Kiosks just completed its second full week of operations and the initial results are positive.  So far our ten vendors have purified over 4,000 liters of drinking water and cleaned over 150 water storage containers.  Not bad for a brand new service in one of the poorer villages within Kibera. 

Life Force Kiosks stand in Kibera

Sales were a bit slow after the first couple of days, but our management team has been doing a great job of working with the vendors to improve performance.  One vendor went several days with no sales at all.  Steve spent all day on Monday and Tuesday co-running the stand with that vendor and he sold over 20 chlorine top-ups.  That showed the vendor that people really do want our service and he really can make some extra money by working with us.  Today Steve just spent the day observing but let the vendor take full control, and that vendor made 13 sales on his own.  We plan on replicating that process for all under-performing vendors over the next couple of weeks and expect to see solid improvement across our vendor network.  Once that is done and we feel confident that all vendors are fully on board and comfortable with their roles, we’ll shift our focus towards community marketing and consumer demand generation. 

I’ll continue to post updates to let you know how things are going.  So far I’m very pleased with our early performance and more importantly with the potential we’re seeing.

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Life Force Kiosks stand

After the first full day of operations, I’m pleased to report that things are going very well so far and our vendors have been successfully promoting our services.  Since we started operations on Wednesday, we have already cleaned 43 water storage containers and sold 56 doses of chlorine water treatment.  That equates to 1,120 liters of drinking water that’s been purified by Life Force Kiosks in just a day and a half.

LFK Vendor cleaning a water storage container

What’s exciting is that most of the vendors have quickly embraced the Life Force Kiosks model and are actively promoting the services.  The community is showing good interest for such a new service as well.  Over time as we iron out some of the kinks with our vendors and ramp up our demand generation activities, I’m very optimistic that these numbers will grow and we’ll be able to make a significant impact to the health of the community.

Life Force Kiosks Vendor in action

Stay tuned for additional updates and photos over the coming days and weeks.

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It’s amazing to think that what began with a simple tour through Kibera over a year ago has turned into an organization with two Kenyan managers, twelve water vendors, and an innovative model to improve access to clean drinking water in the poorest communities.  Life Force Kiosks is currently scheduled to start operations on Wednesday, May 25, 2011. 

Preparations for our launch event are nearly complete.  We’ve invited guest speakers from the Ministry of Public Health and Sanitation, KEMRI, the local government, and the water vendor network.  Numerous other non-profit organizations, community groups, and leaders from schools and religious organizations have also been invited to attend.  We’ve hired a band and an Emcee to draw a crowd and entertain at the event, which will be held in a large outdoor area in the heart of Kibera.  We have a 100 person tent as well in case of rain and based on the way people cram into busses here, it can probably fit 300 people.  2,000 leaflets touting our services and benefits have been printed, and they include a 4 month calendar so people will hang them in their houses (people LOVE displaying calendars here in Kenya).  We’ll also be serving free Life Force Kiosks treated water from branded water tanks so people in the community can see for themselves that our water has a nice, natural taste. 

Detailed vendor training is being conducted today.  The session includes technical training on how to purify the water and clean the storage containers as well as business training.  At the end of the training session, our managers will pretend to be potential customers and each vendor will have the opportunity to pitch them our services, overcome common objections that they’ll raise, and then clean a container and purify the water. 

I look forward to posting several pictures of the launch event next week, as well as pictures and updates on our live operations.  Stay tuned.  Things are getting exciting!

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