Jibu: safe, clean, affordable drinking water

After visiting GreenChar, the next stop was another slum across Nairobi to meet Jibu, a multi-national for-profit startup tackling the problem of safe, clean, affordable drinking water in Africa.

This has been a very difficult problem area for for-profits to tackle, do to competition with free, but unsafe water, along with the low purchasing power of the people who most need better sources of water.

Jibu has a model that is working, setting up local franchisees who know their communities. The parent company finances the equipment needed to purify the water, and the franchisees operate the equipment and sell the water.

The Investors Circle group visited the first Kenyan Jibu franchisee, which is located in the middle of the newest slum, on the edge of the city by the airport. Between that setting, the underlying story, and the amazing entrepreneur who is making this happen, I once again felt like emptying my pockets of cash, buying up everyone on the display table, and walking it out into the slum to give it away.

But once again my impact investing ethos kicked in when I realized that Jibu is proving it possible to scale up their solution across all of Africa, profitably. That I want to see.

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