If we want to reach our mission to provide safe access to water to 1 million people by 2025, our voice needs to be heard. Our Founder & CEO – Sunil Lalvani, did exactly that. He has been featured as a prominent social entrepreneur in the region, explaining how we at Project Maji do things differently. In a detailed interview Mr. Lalvani has shared experiences that prompted the creation of Project Maji, the business approach to providing sustainable access to safe water in rural communities, the success of having impacted the lives of 50,000 people in Ghana and Kenya and the challenges and pitfalls of the global water space:
“In this space, I saw two things that were wrong. One, people were still building hand pumps, which is an ancient technology. We have no right to give villages a hand pump. Not only because it requires a physical pumping, but because it is hugely unreliable as any other mechanical product. Even the best hand pump is going to break. Then, if it breaks, they assume that the village will fix it, but nobody goes back and checks. People build schools or hospitals and walk away. They don’t do it with a bad heart, but also with no long-term understanding of the problem. The principle of building something and giving it to the people in the area is good, but these people need more help, guidance, and support.”
The second challenge Mr. Lalvani narrates is being “stuck between friends and family who wanted to donate but not to invest, and investors who wanted higher returns”. Simply put, those who were eager to donate, saw no point in this being an “investment thing”. On the other hand, investors generally did not come with the right mindset, saying the returns were disappointingly low.
Hence, the Project Maji model is very much the anti-thesis of what already exists in the global water space. It is a solar-powered sustainable solution, that has disrupted traditional means of rural water supply. Not only that, the Maji solution has been designed with a complete business mindset, steering clear of being labelled a charity. Instead, we are trying to push for Social Return on Investment (SROI), where you look at the whole impact cost of what’s been done i.e. By giving these villages water, children can go to school, women can work, less money is spent on medicine and hospitals, and the whole area prospers. All of that is an ROI. The point is that the village is going to get the return, not you, so that can be seen as a philanthropic donation.
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