Forty billion (40,000,000,000) miles of walking for water per year; a leader of Kenya claims that eight billion of that is done in their country alone. That’s a lot of manual (gynical?) intervention, often during hours of darkness with a full day ahead of them, with low marginal productivity. Pat Mitchell, the President and CEO, The Paley Center for Media, notes that her great-grandmother did the same thing—in the United States. Tyler Cowen’s claim of a “Great Stagnation” look more and more backwards.
Marta Echavarria, a Colombian who is the Founding Director of EcoDecision, opens by discussing how important for health and growth it is the downstream and upstream process is managed. She notes that she began working for sugar producers—large water users, almost all men—whose initial idea was “to buy the watershed.” This didn’t work, so instead producers and cities built community Water User Associations that worked in both directions—reforestation, usage controls, and “water quality trading,” which is something like cap-and-trade but with market segmentation based on the absolute need for purity. Echavarria noted that she is one of the rare women involved—“the world of water is male,” and “water rights are linked to land rights, which remain dominated by males.”
Echavarria was followed by Betty Kyazike, who is a Ugandan Branch Manager for Living Goods (which Mitchell describes as “a mash-up between Avon and Microfinance”), which serves 700 communities, and whose business model depends primarily on recruiting women as sales operatives. Kyazike, one of the most dynamic speakers at the conference, manages a branch of 50 communities, having risen from an initial sales position to run “the top-performing branch” of the organizations. (Mitchell: “I don’t think we’re at all surprised.” Did I mention that Kyazike speaks, in English at least, with the cadence of a hyperactive William Shatner?)
As with the earlier meeting, Ms.Mitchell notes that there is an education process to selling the Living Goods products: showing how they can prevent and reduce the spread of diseases such as diarrhea and cholera through sanitation and hand-washing. Teaching disease prevention and risk reduction through products such as water treatment tabs and filters. Literally, life-changing products in the developing world.
(I really want to find someone to put a music track behind Kyazike’s presentation; it would be a best-selling album.)
Keith Weed, the Chief Marketing and Communications Officer for Unilever, follows by noting that if his sales staff had Kyazike’s passion, they would be even bigger than they are. Unilever has committed very publicly to a Sustainable Living Plan, which is very public and very centered on potable water. Again, this is about providing products that can change people’s lives. “On average, the walk to collect water is 3.7 miles per day”—at least half of which is carrying heavy water over unsteady ground. (He tried it and ended up with a backache.) One of the things that Weed notes is that people don’t tell the truth about what they did—not always deliberately lying so much as not being fully aware of how much is used or how much time something takes to do. Weed notes that the biggest daily use of water is laundry: adding a cleanser that allows people to go from using three buckets of water for rinsing to one is both a behavioral change and a water savings. Similarly, he notes that there are more mobile telephones than toilets in India—and mobile telephones were a change in behavior in themselves.
Mark Tercek, the President and CEO of The Nature Conservancy notes that when poaching in Kenya is stopped, money starts flowing back into the city, which uses it for education and water. One village combined this by making water pickup available in the schools, aiding both areas. The side benefit of conservation is also that the people feel safer when the poachers are gone; Tercek cites a woman who “no longer sleeps in her shoes” because she now will not have to be ready to run in the middle of the night.
Tercek tells about how Quito, Ecuador, was contemplating an investment in a large water treatment plant. Instead, The Nature Conservancy and others were able to convinced them to invest in upstream conservation that keeps the water clean before it gets there (on the model of NYC, which receives its potable water from upstate). In doing follow-up work on the project, The Nature Conservancy discovered that the added efforts upstream had led to entrepreneurial expansion: women who used to raise sheep making clothes for local sales instead. Marta Echavarria noted that a similar effort afoot in Lima, Peru, led by AquaFund (which is part of the InterAmerican Development Bank) that has produced a Water Trust Fund with reciprocal agreements to finance local businesses. But she notes that these efforts need to scale, and are being impeded by historic water and land rights restrictions.
In a discussion more related to Organization Management than the specific topic, a speaker from the audience noted that her new organization was attempting to raise $1B over the next five years. Mark Tercek pointed out that it is not necessary to form a new organization if there is already one working in the same space; in the NGO/Charitable Organization sector, you often can get a better return by advocating, supporting, and helping existing organizations to improve. After all, his organization spends—and, more importantly, can spend—half a billion dollars a year. Collaboration, not competition, can produce better results in the public sector.
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