How can Africa break out of its dependence upon subsistence farming?
One way is through simple water pumps. Across the continent farmers depend on rainfall to nourish their crops and despite hard work only manage to eke out a meager living.
An innovative manual pump system, designed to cheaply and effectively irrigate 1 to 2 acres of land is finding customers, rich and poor, across East Africa.
KickStart, creator of the pumps, is a social enterprise which for the past 22 years has designed, marketed, and sold appropriate technologies meant to “get millions of people out of poverty quickly, cost-effectively and sustainably.” The company says its aim is to “change the way the world fights poverty.”
Rain-fed agriculture
The MoneyMaker Hip Pump and Super MoneyMaker Pump, KickStart’s two flagship products, have helped launch over 111,800 new businesses, lifted over 500,000 people out of poverty, and are generating $113mn in new profits annually through agriculture, according to their website. The pumps, on average, result in a “10-fold increase in income" for customers, according to KickStart’s co-founder Nick Moon.
Some 90 to 96 per cent of sub-Saharan Africa’s population is still dependent on rain-fed agriculture, where crops can be harvested only once or twice per year, resulting in a feast-famine production cycle that continually challenges Africa.
In Tanzania, the agricultural sector accounts for nearly 80 per cent of employment and 75 per cent of rural household income, yet only 26.5 per cent of GDP. Land for farming is readily available. Effective tools for small-scale irrigation, on the other hand, are not.
Alfred Wise, KickStart’s Country Director for Tanzania, explains that technologies such as the MoneyMaker pumps allow people “to grow more, more often.” The pumps enable small landholder farmers to switch from low value to high value crops, and become less dependent on rain.
Growing demands
Through marketing these cost-effective pumps, KickStart is vying to transform small, subsistence farmers into productive business units that, they hope, will feed Africa’s growing food demands.
Although KickStart is a nonprofit organization, they consider themselves a “social enterprise” because they sell their pumps, rather than distributing them for free. Through an extensive network of 220 branded dealers across Tanzania, they have sold over 40,000 pumps since beginning operations in 2000, at a price much lower than diesel pumps ($66 for the MoneyMaker Hip and $112 for the Super MoneyMaker.)
Moon says that KickStart is a nonprofit due to the high cost of funding R&D efforts for these productivity-increasing technologies. Since “the African governments are not typically funding R&D”, he says that donors are needed to support R&D and subsidize the cost of the pumps and accelerate the diffusion of this technology.
Limitations
Yet the pumps have their limitations. Only 12 per cent of sub-Saharan Africa’s population lives in areas with a water source within 23 feet of the surface to use the pump.
In addition, not all customers are using the pumps to be “lifted out of poverty.” Gideon Mgweno, a Monitoring and Evaluation officer for KickStart Tanzania, estimates 12 to 20 per cent of their pumps are purchased by individuals who use them for domestic use, such as pumping water into an elevated tank when the electricity is out. Finally, the pump can’t help those who lack land, seeds, fertilizers and a market.
Despite their limitations, these pumps appear to highlight the power, potential and ultimate need for innovation in Africa’s agricultural sector.
