Clean Water For All

It’s amazing that two years ago today, Life Force Kiosks launched in Kibera.  I’m so proud of my team for their continued dedication toward improving the lives in their community.  We’re closing in on an exciting milestone – 1 million liters of water purified . I can’t wait to announce that, and it shouldn’t be too much longer.

This past year has been very interesting.  For several months, our focus was split as we engaged in a partnership with an organization called Impact Carbon.  Impact Carbon’s work improves health, reduces poverty, and improves local environments while slowing climate change.  They build and support projects that help people access new technologies such as clean cookstoves and water treatment systems. They leverage carbon finance and social finance to bring these projects to scale.

Life Force Kiosks and Impact Carbon joined forces to help get chlorine-based community water treatment qualified for carbon offset financing.  For those of you not familiar with carbon offset financing, I’ll give a brief description.  Basically companies and individuals make financial contributions to help “reduce their carbon footprint”.  If you’ve bought a ticket on Expedia recently, they probably asked if you wanted to donate a few bucks towards this.  Of course your $7 can’t reduce the fuel used for your flight, so instead that money is pooled to fund projects that reduce the use of natural resources like trees and coal around the world.  In many developing nations, wood and coal is used to boil water to purify water.  Life Force Kiosks purifies water with chlorine, reducing the need to boil water.  During the past year we acted as a proof-of-concept to show that our model (and related non-boiling technologies like ceramic water filters), could effectively reduce the burning of wood and charcoal.  I’m pleased to say that after a lot hard work from Steve and the Impact Carbon team, we were successful in demonstrating this and non-boiling water treatment received approval for carbon funding.

With that success came some tradeoffs.  As Steve spent a significant amount of time working with Impact Carbon, Life Force Kiosks was not able to have quite the same impact in Kibera this past year compared to our first.  However, we did purify over 330,000 liters of water this past year, bringing our total to over 875,000 liters of water since we went live.

We’re continuing to transfer more ownership of LFK’s operations to the Kenyan management team.  I remain committed to the cause and to LFK, but I also believe that our long-term success is dependent on the ownership  of our Kenyan team.  They’re the ones living in Kibera, seeing first-hand the problems that exist there, and are in the best position to execute solutions to those problems.

I look forward to hopefully announcing that we’ve purified over a million liters of water in the next few months.  Again, I’d like to thank everyone who’s supported Life Force Kiosk and enabled us to achieve these fantastic results.  And of course Life Force Kiosks would be nothing without Steve, Freddy, and our vendors, so thank you so much for the work you do every day.  Happy anniversary, Life Force Kiosks.

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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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