Microfinance is one of the hottest trends in social entrepreneurship right now and microfinance organizations such as Kiva, the Grameen Foundation, and ACCION have been producing amazing results in the flight against global poverty. The success of microfinance has led to a growing number of niche microfinance organizations offering microloans to help people tackle specific problems. One of the largest and most established of these niche microfinance programs is Water.org‘s WaterCredit, whch offers low interest microloans to help families and communities improve their local water infrastructure.
A relative newcomer in the niche microfinance industry is Energy in Common, which offers microloans to help families improve their access to reliable, inexpensive, and environmentally sustainable sources of energy. Worldwide, about 1 in 3 people lacks access to reliable forms of energy. This exacerbates their poverty in many ways. For example, using firewood for cooking contributes to deforestation and desertification, which can destroy the livelihoods of poor families. As trees disappear, people (especially women and children) must spend more and more time finding firewood for cooking, leaving them less time to tend their families, improve their education, or run small businesses. Cooking indoors over an open fire, as many families dependent on firewood must do, can also contribute to respiratory problems and other health conditions. Another common option for families without access to modern forms of energy is kerosene. Unfortunately, kerosene is not very efficient and can be extremely expensive – up to 30% of a family’s income.
What They Do
Energy in Common helps solve these problems by helping poor families take out low interest loans to help them pay for cleaner, more reliable sources of energy.
dorothy buahin Energy in Common: Fighting Energy Poverty With Microfinance
Dorothy Buahin
For example, Dorothy Buahin is one of the entrepreneurs seeking a loan on Energy in Common’s site to help her buy solar lanterns. These portable lanterns combine a small solar panel with a rechargeable battery and energy-efficient LED lightbulbs, allowing them to be used after charging even when the sun is not shining. Dorothy owns a provision shop in Ketan, Ghana and hopes to expand her hours of operation with the help of solar lanterns to light the shop after dark. She also hopes her children will be able to study better in the evenings with the help of the lanterns.
Another entrepreneur seeking a loan is Mary Ephraim, who hopes to use the loan to purchase a clean-burning stove. She is a baker who currently relies on wood fires, which can be difficult to light after rain and is smoky and can heat inconsistently. She hopes that a clean burning stove will not only reduce the time she must spend tending the fire, but also improve her product quality and save money by using less fuel.
Energy in Common also offers loans to help entrepreneurs purchase biogas digesters, which turn organic waste into renewable energy while also producing nutrient-rich compost to spread on fields and improve crop production, and solar panels to power homes or businesses.
Like Kiva, Energy in Common is a nonprofit organization that distributes the loans through its field partners. In addition to the warm fuzzy feeling lenders can get from helping relieve poverty and save the Earth at the same time, you can also receive carbon offsets to help offset your own carbon footprint.
To learn more, you can visit Energy in Common’s official website, or follow them on Twitter or Facebook.
Water.org is a non-profit organization that uses innovative solutions inspired by for-profit social enterprises to provide sustainable sources of clean drinking water to poor families and communities in the developing world.
Why Water?
Water.org was co-founded by Gary White and Hollywood star and screenwriter Matt Damon. One of its missions is simply to raise awareness of the severity of the water crisis affecting the world. In much of the Western world, we can simply walk a few feet to a tap and have a seemingly endless supply of clean, safe drinking water pouring into our cup, so it can be hard to imagine an Ethiopian farmer walking two hours a day to fill a jug with muddy water from a well she must share with livestock, wildlife, and thousands of other nearby farm families. Yet that is the situation for many of the world’s people. Nearly 900 million people worldwide lack access to clean drinking water, and nearly half of the world lacks access to improved sanitation facilities such as toilets. Of those, about 1.2 billion people don’t have access to any sanitation facilities at all.
Water.org: Bringing Clean Water To the WorldThe effects of this crisis are staggering, and widespread. About half of all hospitalizations around the world are the result of water-related illnesses. 24,000 children under the age of five die every single day from easily preventable water-related diseases such as diarrhea. Many more children, especially girls, are taken out of school to help their mothers gather water, a process that can take up to six hours a day in some regions. Not only does this prevent these children from improving their lives through education, the hard labor of carrying heavy water jugs every day can stunt their growth, causing other health problems such as difficulty giving birth. Younger children are often left home alone for hours every day while their mothers and older siblings collect water and their fathers work. In addition to forcing parents to pull some children from school and leave others home alone without care, time spent fetching water is also time that adult women and men cannot spend on activities such as farming, managing a small business, helping children with homework, and returning to school to improve their own education.
In addition to improving public health and economic opportunities for poor families, improving sanitation and access to clean drinking water also improves local environmental health. In developing countries, more than 80% of raw sewage is typically discharged directly into lakes, streams, and other waterways. This not only encourages the spread of disease, it also contributes to freshwater pollution that is leading to plummeting levels of biodiversity in freshwater ecosystems around the world.
What They Do
Water.org confronts these problems with a variety of innovative solutions.
Water.org’s projects are demand-driven, meaning they work only with individuals and communities that have contacted them (through local partner organizations) for aid first. This ensures that the community is more invested in the project and increases the chances for long-term sustainability and maintenance of the project. (Worldwide, over 50% of water projects fail within the first few years, usually because the local community is not invested in the project or is not given the skills or tools necessary to maintain it.) One of the first things Water.org does when coming into a new community is to set up a water committee. Because women disproportionately bear the burden of collecting water, the committee must always include female members.
Water.org works closely with water committees and the community at large to determine local needs, and emphasizes the use of locally available materials and appropriate technology to build wells and sanitation projects. The local community helps build the project, and is given the training and tools necessary to perform basic maintenance and repairs. Water.org also runs training sessions and other education programs for the local community emphasizing the role of good sanitation in preventing disease.
In addition to these more community-focused programs, Water.org also runs an innovative microcredit program called WaterCredit that offers small loans to individuals and communities to help them improve their access to clean drinking water and sanitation facilities. Since the founding of the WaterCredit program in 2003, borrowers have taken out $2.5 million in loans, with a repayment rate of 96%. More than 12,000 loans have been issued, benefiting more than 158,000 people.
One WaterCredit success story is that of S. Gandhamani in India, who took out a loan to get a new water supply tap installed in her yard as part of a wider effort to improve access to safe drinking water in her entire village. In addition to saving hr much time that was once spent walking back and forth to a communal tap, the wastewater from her tap now drains into her garden. Once dry and neglected, the garden now blooms with food for her family and for sale. Since the addition of the new tap, Gandhamani has planted a number of banana trees in her garden which have increased her income by the equivalent of five weeks of work per year!
Water.org has made especially effective use of Twitter and other social media platforms to spread the word about its programs. In addition to regularly updating their own Twitter account with the latest news and calls to action, Water.org has set up a retweet app that allows users to “donate” their status to tweets from Water.org. Water.org also used Twitter to launch and promote its Haiti Challenge, an effort to provide clean drinking water for 50,000 Haitian citizens.
Water.org also maintains an active presence on Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr.
Garbage has long been regarded as a serious environmental problem. In the United States, 80% of our garbage is recyclable, yet just 28% gets recycled. Most of the rest ends up in massive landfills – the largest the size of 2,000 football fields. More garbage ends up polluting the environment as litter, or contributing to any of seven known trash vortexes in the world’s oceans. The most famous, known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, is believed to cover an area twice the size of Texas, and may even be as large as the entire continental United States.
Though garbage has long been regarded, rightfully, as an environmental nightmare, a growing number of entrepreneurs are beginning to regard it instead as a goldmine. By recycling, reusing, and repurposing garbage, these entrepreneurs not only help conserve resources, reduce the need for landfills, and prevent or clean up unsightly and harmful litter, they can also save money for businesses!
One example of the new breed of waste management entrepreneurs is RecycleMatch.com. Founded by Brooke Betts Farrell and Chad Farrell, RecycleMatch helps match companies who have waste products with companies who need waste products. One company can make extra money selling waste materials that would otherwise be a liability, the other company can save money purchasing the materials it needs more cheaply than it would find them from traditional sources. Best of all, the exchange conserves resources and reduces waste. It’s a win-win-win situation for both companies and the environment, too!
To date, RecycleMatch has helped keep more than 3 million pounds of waste materials out of landfills. A few examples include a company that sold 180,000 pounds of glass windows removed during a major renovation effort to another company that turned them into beautiful glass tiles and countertops, and a company that sold used vinyl billboards to a company that turned them into reusable shopping bags! Other materials traded on the site have included polyester textile waste, salvaged wood decking materials, waste sodium methylate crystals, and used plastic foam packaging.
If you have (or need) commercial quantities of waste products or raw materials that might find a useful second life in the right hands, RecycleMatch can help!
In order to get started on RecycleMatch, companies need to provide a little upfront information, including:
Description of the waste or materials offered or wanted
Estimated Quantities
Location
Photos
Packaging/Loadout Information
Your company’s name is kept confidential during the matching process in order. Only when a match is made will the two company’s learn each other’s identity in order to complete the transaction.
RecycleMatch is a for-profit social enterprise. Listing materials on the website is free. However, once a successful match is made, RecycleMatch charges a one-time match fee and a small additional fee per ton of materials exchanged. Posting a wanted listing requires an upfront fee. This helps ensure that only serious buyers use the site.
In addition to making use of the service to make money, save money, and go green, you can also show your support for RecycleMatch’s good work by following them on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.
Consumer habits are responsible for so many of the sustainability issues we face today, which means as consumers, we are extremely powerful. There are thousands of green companies now developing eco-friendly consumer goods that reduce resource consumption, cut toxicity, diminish water and energy consumption, and limit waste. But how, as a consumer, do you find them all?
That’s where green marketing entrepreneurs come in! These smart, savvy individuals are finding ways to promote and inspire a new generation of green consumers with an eye for profitability that doesn’t break the environmental bank.
Green Marketing TV interviewed Sundeep Ahuja, founder of blissmo, a green groupon service for savvy green consumers looking for sustainable products and services that meet quality and organic standards. They feature green businesses through regular deals that provide discounts to consumers while promoting eco-friendly companies seeking a place in the market. (Interested green businesses can connect with blissimo online.) Using social media, this groupon site has become a hub for green business development activity.
blissmo’s mission is to shift demand towards “sustainable consumption” in an effort to fight climate change and prevent environmental degradation. We do this by finding the best sustainable and organic products and services and introducing them to the savvy, conscious shopper at discounts of up to 50%. Changing consumption patterns is no easy task, and discounts are a proven way to get consumers to try new things.
Our business model is similar to Groupon.com’s in that we promote qualified businesses free of cost and take a small commission on any discounted vouchers we sell. Unlike Groupon we’re a mission-driven organization seeking to set these businesses up for long-term success, so our fee is much less and we’re more flexible around terms.
In one way, it took years of experience at eBay and MySpace, helping launch Kiva.org, and co-founding two previous startups (richrelevance and The Extraordinaries). In another way, all it took was a vision, powerful off-the-shelf tools such as WordPress and Google Docs, a strong and growing team of talented individuals who believe in the mission, and friends wanting to help out – plus lots of hard work and hustle.
At the moment blissmo is self-funded. We’re not opposed to taking investment in the future, but because we’re mission driven we’re waiting until we’ve proven the model and our mission-driven approach until we take outside capital.
Through “word-of-mouth” and “word-of-mouse”, social media marketing on Facebook and Twitter, and through blog outreach to communities of green consumers.
It’s a combination of them reaching out to us, our community and friends suggesting businesses and introducing us to them, and our own research. Definitions of “green” vary; we look for values driven, people and planet neutral or positive businesses, products and services. Ideally they are certified by a relevant third party (i.e. San Francisco’s Green Business Program), or if not, they are authentically sustainable in a way that we feel comfortable promoting them to our community.
We’ve been surprised and amazed by the number of passionate and clever entrepreneurs out there creating some great alternatives to “conventional” products. Part of what makes blissmo so fun is that we discover these companies and help them by promoting them to the very consumers who would appreciate them.
The biggest mistake was expecting the revenue to just come pouring in. After hearing stories about how much money Groupon and similar companies were making, we thought even though our commission is much less we should be covering costs in no time. Ha! Most definitely not true. It’s a long road, and “green” entrepreneurs – in both senses of the word – should be ready for that.
Be sure you know what your revenue model is, and how long it will take to scale. Even if you have the best idea or the best intentions, ultimately if you want to build something that will be have broad impact make sure it can be a real, sustainable business.