Cleaning Up Kibera

I recently wrote about educational entrepreneurs serving the needs of the poor in Africa and, particularly, in the Kibera slums of Nairobi. It turns out that Kibera is filled with all kinds of entrepreneurs, including David Kuria.

Mr. Kuria is helping to address one of the most pressing, difficult of social problems in the developing world: he's providing good sanitation facilities to the urban poor. Here's a story I love about three African entrepreneurs who are attacking the problems of poor sanitation and making a profit in the process. Mr. Kuria is one of them. He has brought the concept of "toilet malls" to Kenya's slums. (The photo of a toilet mall comes from the OneWorld story). In this case, Mr. Kuria's toilet mall provides (for a fee) toilet stalls, showers for men and women, a diaper-changing area, a water kiosk (for people to purchase clean water to take home) and other services such as phone booths or shoe shines. The facilities are clean -- which reduces the risk of water-borne disease -- and affordable. Using the toilet costs about .06 cents (5 Ksh); a shower is about .12 cents (10 Ksh). The result of this innovation: tens of thousands of customers are using this service each day to make their lives a little more pleasant. This would seem to be the kind of project that's scalable, given a somewhat supportive institutional environment. Here's some additional information on the company.

Also VERY interesting is the work being done in Nigeria by Dr. Joseph Adelegan, a civil engineer who has figured out how to take the waste material from cattle slaughtering and turn it into biogas that can be used to generate electricity and can also be used for cooking fuel. The fuel is sold to urban poor and the waste from Dr. Adelegan's factory is turned into fertilizer. Here's a story from Case Western Reserve that provides additional information about Dr. Adelegan's project.

For me, these stories highlight the often overlooked, but ultimately essential role that entrepreneurs play in society: they problem solve and bring creative solutions to market. Customers benefit, they benefit, and in these cases, the world is a better and cleaner place as a result.

- Karol