Carbon for Water

Contracting diarrhea from contaminated drinking water is a major, life threating risk for many living in Sub Saharan Africa. To kill the waterborne bacteria and parasites that cause diarrhea, drinking water must be boiled on a wood stove, meaning firewood must be harvested from an ever dwindling nearby forest. School aged children are often sent out to collect the firewood meaning they don’t attend school. Additionally, the smoke from the fires doesn’t only damage the environment but is a direct cause of lung disease due the poorly ventilated homes.

Enter entrepreneur Mikkel Vestergaard who developed a product called Lifestraw that can decontaminate drinking water. LifeStraw is a carbon-based filter that removes harmful bacteria and parasites from drinking water. It requires no special equipment to operate and is simple to use. (Today this product is also popular with backcountry adventurers). However brilliant the Lifestraw is, this innovation alone wouldn’t solve the problem. Sadly, building a better mousetrap does not leave people beating a path to your door…even when that product can save a life! Fortunately, Mr. Vestergaard understood this and set out to create a strategy to bring LifeStraw to those who needed it most. These also happened to be those most skeptical of its benefits.

Partnering with the Kenyan Ministry of Health, LifeStraw identified 900,000 households in western Kenya where safe drinking water was a major challenge. LifeStraw invested 30 million dollars in giving away a free LifeStraw water filter to every family. Along with investing in the water filters they hired 8000 staff to distribute the filters to the families, showing them how it worked and if it broke to replace it. Yet this isn’t a story of philanthropy; it was the beginning of a strategy.

Instrumental to the success of LifeStraw was their partnership with the local health authority. Ensuring the health clinics used the LifeStraw themselves was key in gaining acceptance among the local families. After all, if the doctors and nurses working at the health clinic trusted the LifeStraw to remove harmful water borne bacteria …so could they. Additionally, LifeStraw’s goal of “doing business while doing good” was supported by the carbon credit market which was created in 1992 at the UN Rio Climate Conference. The UN created a market for carbon emission by allowing businesses to sell or purchase carbon offset credits so they don’t need to pay tax on their carbon emissions, or if they have invested in technology to remove carbon, they could sell extra credits for a profit.

Recall, to get clean drinking water wood was being burned to boil water. To earn the carbon credits that they could later sell, LifeStraw needed an auditor to independently verify the quantity of CO2 emission reductions. To accomplish this LifeStraw set out to measure how much water was filtered, how much less water was boiled and how much less firewood was burned. To produce the data to support their claims LifeStraw issued smart phones to half the workforce (4000 phones). With each LifeStraw placed a picture of the water filter was taken showing it being delivered. The phone also recorded to whom the water filter was given, how many people lived together who would be using the filtered water and the barcode on the filter was scanned so water usage could be tracked. By verifying how much water was not being boiled, the auditor could issue the carbon credits to LifeStraw which then sold them on the open market generating 14 million dollars in sales in year one alone. LifeStraw is the first water product to be registered on the carbon market. It’s also the first product on the carbon market with measured health and development benefits removing 1.2 million tons of carbon from the environment in its first 6 months.

What can we learn from Mikkel Vestergaard and LifeStraw…

1.Healthy profits and healthy communities can be complementary goals: This is something all enterprises should strive for.

2. A revolutionary new product doesn’t create its own customers: New products need a solid launch strategy to succeed, and LifeStraw created just that.

3.Don’t doubt the importance of opinion leaders: A westerner arriving with a new product that professed to clean drinking water wasn’t going to fly. Only when the locals saw their health clinics using the product did it make it “OK” to use it themselves.

4.Opportunities rarely present themselves; they must be developed: Linking clean drinking water to the reduction of carbon to earn a profit was brilliant.

“Strong business, Strong communities” is a motto I live by. For LifeStraw, it could easily be “Stronger business…Healthier communities”.Most businesses can’t draw a direct line to improved health and societal outcomes as can LifeStraw, however, it’s strong businesses that create our strong communities. Make sure your strategy builds both!