To read more case studies like this, visit us at www.TacticsofHope.org/resources

The PlayPump® water system is an ingenuous, simple, low-tech solution for developing countries, which lose thousands of lives every day from lack of clean water.  Roundabout Outdoor, and its non-profit partner, PlayPumps International (www.Playpumps.org), has adapted a water pump technology that doubles as a merry-go-round.  Children play and turn the merry-go-round, pumping water from deep in the ground to a storage container that can be used for billboard advertising to generate revenue.  The technology is replicable, as Playpumps International plans to scale its operations with 4,000 new pumps to reach 10 million people by 2010.



•    950 PlayPumps have been installed in four African countries to date; 700 of these have been in South Africa alone.
•    Over 2 million people can access free clean drinking water that could not before.
•    Hundreds of jobs have been created through the PlayPump maintenance program.
•    PlayPumps International plans to help install 4,000 pumps by 2010, in 10 African countries, and at a cost of $60 million.
•    PlayPumps International has raised $20 million to date for this initiative.
•    1 PlayPump costs $14,000 and includes equipment, installation, water quality testing, community liaison and 10 years of maintenance.
•    President Bill Clinton, First Lady Laura Bush, and platinum-selling rapper Jay-Z have all endorsed PlayPumps in African communities.

The PlayPump® Water System – How It Works



While children have fun (1) spinning on the PlayPump merry-go-round, clean water (2) is pumped from underground (3) into a 2,500-liter tank (4), standing seven meters above the ground.  A simple tap (5) makes it easy for adults and children to draw water. Excess water is diverted from the storage tank back down into the borehole (6).  The water storage tank (7) provides a rare opportunity to advertise in outlaying communities.  All four sides of the tank are leased as billboards, with two sides for consumer advertising and the other two sides for health and educational messages. The revenue generated by this unique model pays for pump maintenance.

The design of the PlayPump water system makes it highly effective, easy to operate and very economical, keeping costs and maintenance to an absolute minimum.  Capable of producing up to 1,400 liters of water per hour at 16 rpm from a depth of 40 meters, it is effective up to a depth of 100 meters.  Each identified borehole used for a PlayPump system undergoes a series of geo-hydrological tests as well as water chemical tests to ensure that the water source is suitable for human consumption.  A typical hand pump installation cannot compete with the PlayPump system's delivery rate or quality.

The two most important ways that individuals support PlayPumps is to raise awareness of the need and raise money to make their water systems available to more communities in more countries.  They document on their website that $6 provides one child with access to clean water for up to ten years, $36 for a family, $60 for 10 people, and $300 for a classroom of children for drinking and hand washing.  $14,000 is the cost of an entire PlayPump system, bringing clean water to 2,500 people for ten years.

PlayPumps International is the nonprofit collaborative that partners with the South African companies, Roundabout Outdoor and Outdoor Fabrication and Steelworks, as well as all of its advertising clients that market their products on the PlayPump billboards.  Outdoor Fabrication and Steelworks manufactures the pumps and piping, which Roundabout Outdoor then helps to install and maintain in contract with PlayPumps.  For its billboard sponsors, PlayPumps and Roundabout Outdoor have partnered to include International telecommunications companies like Vodacom, and consumer goods companies like Colgate-Palmolive and Unilever.  In addition to selecting only socially positive content, the organization also takes great care in making sure that both public service announcements and commercial advertising are sensitive to the local community’s culture.


Founders of Playpumps Trevor Field and Paul Ristic

Working hand-in-hand with local governments and community leaders, the PlayPump system is introduced under a principle of indigenous self-ownership from the beginning.  Once a community has agreed that it wants a pump, a liaison is appointed.  Roundabout Outdoor then trains a local crew to install and maintain the pump, giving jobs to local workers.  Over the next three years, PlayPump water systems will be installed throughout sub-Saharan Africa, with the goal of reaching 10 million people by 2010.  In 2006, additional PlayPump systems were donated to communities in South Africa and pilot programs were initiated in Mozambique, Swaziland, and Zambia.  Expansion to Ethiopia, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Tanzania, and Uganda, will occur in 2007 and 2008.

To read more about Playpumps and hear their story in their own words, visit us at Tactics of Hope: How Social Entrepreneurs Are Changing Our World

Photographs courtesy of Playpumps International and Kristina Gubic 2008.

Wilford and his wife Carole hosted Ann Cotton on their houseboat in Sausalito for a “friend-raiser”for the organization Ann founded 15 years ago, and it was my deep honor to meet this radiant woman I had studied and been researching in awe since I wrote a paper on social entrepreneurship two years ago at Middlebury College. Ann’s daughter Helen and David Ebert, the son of the first chair of CAMFED (the Campaign for Female Education), had just produced an incredible documentary film called Where the Water Meets the Sky in which Helen and David put cameras in the hands of women who then became filmmakers documenting the very real poverty, AIDS pandemic, and lack of access to education in their own lives. The film is narrated by Morgan Freeman and has won numerous awards, including best picture at Jackson Hole film festival.


For more on this case study and others like Ann Cotton, visit us at www.tacticsofhope.org/resources

Ann Cotton’s on-the-ground exposure to extreme poverty in Zimbabwe in 1991 changed her life and, in doing so, the futures of hundreds of thousands of young girls in Africa. During that trip, Ann saw clearly the link between the lack of female education and extreme poverty. Since then, Ann and her team have built an organization that currently provides educational opportunities for over 400,000 children and young people in rural villages in sub-Saharan Africa. CAMFED works in partnership with local communities and ministries of education, using an approach that seeks to systemically break the cycle of poverty.

To educate girls is to reduce poverty. No other policy is as likely to raise economic productivity, lower infant and maternal mortality, improve nutrition and promote health—including the prevention of HIV/AIDS.
—Kofi Annan, Former UN Secretary General

In her interview with us, Ann says:

“I had never before witnessed the depth of poverty I witnessed in Zimbabwe and I was initially shocked by what I saw. I was also deeply disturbed by the level of insecurity the young girls had to deal with every day. I realized that the high levels of maternal and child mortality were both caused by women’s vulnerability and their lack of access to education. I found that most parents wanted their daughters to go to school but they did not have the funds to pay for them to do so. In most cases the parents used their scarce resources to educate their sons rather than their daughters because boys had the best chance of securing paid work in the future. My realization was contrary to the broadly held notion that cultural resistance was the main reason for low female school attendance.

On one of my walks between villages, I met two teenage sisters, Cecilia and Makarita. They had bussed and walked sixty miles to attend the Mola Secondary School because the costs were much lower at Mola than at schools near their home. Yet these two young girls told me that they did not know whether their parents would have enough money for them to return to school the next term. As I lay awake at night fearful that scorpions were about to fall upon me from the thatched roof above, I realized that the girls were trapped. I also realized that what kept the cycle of poverty in place was not a poverty of culture but the culture of poverty.


CAMFED students at class under the shade of a tree

Back in England in 1992, my first effort to raise money to enable young girls like Cecilia and Makarita to go to school was making and selling cakes and sandwiches with friends at the local market. Before long I had raised enough money to pay for thirty-two girls in Zimbabwe to go to school for a year.

Right from the start, our approach was to set aside preconceived notions of what the challenges and the solutions were and to listen carefully to the needs and suggestions of the local villagers. They suggested, for example, that the scholarship money should go directly to the schools rather than to the families of the recipients. They recommended that CAMFED only hire locals to run the CAMFED offices rather than rely on expatriates. They stressed the importance of transparency so that everyone knew who was making what decisions and how educational funds were being allocated. They joined us at meetings with the Ministry of Education at the national and district levels to support the initiative and assure its effective implementation.

It has now been fifteen years since CAMFED was founded and I still feel energized by our work. What satisfies me most is seeing the change in others, such as when I meet a girl who received an education because of CAMFED and is now doing wonderful things she would not otherwise have had the opportunity to do.

My advice to others who want to get involved in any social effort is first and foremost for them to find their passion, to get to a point where they have no choice, where they have to act, have to get involved. One has to care enough to let go of fear, to care enough to risk failure and look upon not trying as failure. And listen always, and most carefully, to those experiencing the problem you want to try to solve.”

The CAMFED Model—A Bottom-Up Collaborative Approach

CAMFED now is in the midst of seeking to bring about systemic change in the education of young girls in Africa. Ann has turned CAMFED into a charitable organization that is making it possible for hundreds of thousands of youngsters in Zimbabwe, Ghana, Zambia and Tanzania to receive an education. Most are girls, although some orphan boys are also supported. Boards of trustees are active at each branch, supported by an international advisory board.

CAMFED’s model brings transformative benefits not only to the young girls who they help educate but also to the well-being of their families and communities. A virtuous cycle is set in motion, whereby girls are supported through childhood education and post-school years to become leaders who are in a position to break the cycle of poverty during their own lifetime as well as during the lives of future generations.

The following are some of the most important principles guiding CAMFED’s approach:
 
•    A clear, powerful and inspiring vision
•    A focus on systemic change
•    A bottom-up collaborative approach
•    Staff in each country recruited locally
•    Close working relationships with the ministries of education in each country
•    Transparency
•    Replicability
•    Results-driven
•    A long-term commitment to those CAMFED seeks to educate


Read more about these principles and other stories like Ann's at www.TacticsofHope.org/resources

John Wood, former Microsoft executive and founder of Room to Read (www.RoomtoRead.org), made a promise to a school headmaster while he was backpacking in rural Nepal. He returned a year later with 3,000 books to fill the school’s empty library. In his memoir, Leaving Microsoft to Change the World, John explains, “Did it really matter how many copies of Windows we sold in Taiwan this month when there were millions of children without access to books?” Founding Room to Read, John Wood wove corporate business practices with his inspiring vision to provide educational access to 10 million children in the developing world. His novel approach to non-profit management includes:

•    Scalable, measured, sustainable results
•    Low-overhead, allowing maximum investment in educational infrastructure
•    Challenge grants fostering community ownership and sustainability
•    Strong local staff and partnerships creating culturally relevant programs



The following is an excerpt of great advice from John Wood in his case study (just 1 of 27 and #4 in this Social Edge series) from The Tactics of Hope:

“I’ve talked to a lot of business people who want to follow their passion but don’t know how. I think there’s two common themes that prevent individuals from following their passion. One is that too many people make the mistake of thinking that whatever they do next they have to do for the rest of their lives, and the other is getting caught up in the trap of thinking that they have to receive permission to follow their dream. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard former Wall Street analysts say, “I want to do this, but my spouse doesn’t think it’s a good idea, I have kids, and my parents think it’s silly.” 

Stop asking for permission. It’s your life, and your life only. In deciding what is important to you, you can then get clear about your vision and encourage others to rally behind you. So take that risk. It may ultimately be the most rewarding decision of your life.

    When we started, it was on a severely limited budget in 2003. We began in one country, Nepal, in one language, and with ten titles. I worked for no salary the first four years. This thing was held together with chicken wire and band-aids. Now we’re doing 100 titles a year in eleven languages. And we keep going. The critical key to our success is the relentless tracking, measuring, and publicizing of our results. On every email our team sends in a day, there’s no legal verbiage, just our name, title, and results, which we update quarterly: 3,600 libraries, 287 schools.

Big thinking is a key to our model. In the charity and NGO world, there’s often this scarcity mentality where people are afraid there’s not enough funding out there. If there’s anything I’ve learned from my days at Microsoft, there is certainly enough wealth in this world; you just have to find it. At fundraising events, I’ve heard people say to the audience, “Even if you can only give $5 that’s ok.”  No!  While that comes across as gracious and humble, it in fact signals to potential investors that the organization is afraid or apologizing to ask for money. Don’t talk your donors down; talk them up.
Among our investor community, I constantly repeat the same facts, as if I’m approaching my company board with a business opportunity that cannot be missed. “There’s 800 million people in the developing world who are illiterate,” I tell them, “Think big with me, that’s 800 million individuals we have the privilege of educating.”

    Many people ask what advice I have to entrepreneurs starting their own organization. There are three steps I can think of:

1.    Hire logistical support early on in the venture,
2.    Think big, focus maniacally on results and celebrate small victories when you achieve them.
3.    Find someone local who is well qualified to run operations. We were fortunate to find Denesh Shrestha, a Nepalese businessman who has been entirely dedicated to our vision in Asia. Indigenous partnerships are essential; local organizations may be much better than you can ever hope to be at meeting needs in their part of the world.

The worst mistake a startup social entrepreneur can make is talking yourself into not growing. Every success we have had since our inception is a step to our ultimate goal, focusing big. For us, this means lifelong education for 10 million children across the developing world. What do you want to accomplish? Think big, and then go do it.

Scaling Room to Read over the last three years since its founding, John has applied the rigor of business to the ethic of education, innovating an expansive growth model that will soon provide 10 million children the lifelong opportunity of reading and learning.



You can read more stories like these at www.TacticsofHope.org/resources
Photos courtesy of Room to Read 2008 (c)