In 2013, I joined a cross-organisational team to design a water and health business in Kenya. At that time, I was the Deputy CEO at Water and Sanitation for Urban Populations (WSUP).
The brief was to create franchised, branded kiosks with door-to-door sales in order to rapidly improve the health of millions of poor urban consumers by combining the sales of safe water, nutrition and hygiene products.
Nearly 10 million Kenyans experienced water shortages in urban areas, with almost a billion people worldwide lacking access to safe water. Urban supplies were costly, poor in quality, and hard to reach, discouraging the poor from consuming enough water for good health and leading to high rates of waterborne diseases. Kenya also has high levels of malnutrition, mainly affecting children under five and women. Malnutrition causes underweight, stunting, and wasting, which harm children’s growth and health.
Three organisations came together to address these challenges.
- Water and Sanitation for Urban Populations (WSUP) is an NGO with expertise in urban sanitation and strong relationships with the local public and social sectors in low- to middle-income countries
- Unilever is an FMCG company that has behaviour change expertise plus branding and marketing experience,
- Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) addresses malnutrition via food fortification in developing countries.
We engaged with IDEO.org to help us design a business to address the challenge. The human-centered design process took several week, numerous interviews, observations and mini-experiments to reach the final product. A sample of the final deck is presented below.
We piloted the business in Nairobi for several years.
Andy Narracott 