Martin Fisher on KickStart

KickStart is a nonprofit that develops and markets new technologies in Africa that help local entrepreneurs to establish small businesses. Founder Martin Fisher recently sat down with HaveFunDoGood’s Britt Bravo to discuss the nature of his work, KickStart’s future and his perspective on microfinance. You can read the full article here but here’s a few quotes.

On poverty….

The problem we’re trying to solve is global poverty. As we’ve heard, something like 18% of the people in the world live on less than $1 a day, and a much bigger percentage live on less than $2 a day. The reality is, actually, that these people who are living on less than $1 a day, for the vast majority of them, it’s more like $1 per family, than it is $1 per person. Many, many of these people are actually living on more like 15, 20 cents a day.

As long as we have massive global poverty, we really can’t solve any of our other biggest problems because if you have people who are starving, they’re going to do anything to stay alive. They will absolutely destroy the environment, and it will be the breeding ground for wars, for civil strife, for terrorism, and for refugees. Unless we solve this problem of global poverty, the other problems won’t be able to be solved.

On KickStart…

Our mission is to take millions of people out of poverty, and we do this by first of all recognizing a couple of things. The first thing we recognize is that poor people everywhere are really not that different than us, in that they live in a cash economy, and just like us, if they have a way to make money they can access education, clean water, health care, and all of those other things that we think about as being so important.

If they don’t have a way to make money, they can’t access those things. So, a poor person’s number one need anywhere in the world is actually a way to make more money.

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For example, in Kenya, only 7% of the population, of the labor force, has a job in the formal private sector. In Tanzania, only something like 3.5%; in Sudan, it’s only about 1.5%, and even in India, which we think of as being more developed, it’s only about 10% of the people who actually have a job in the formal private sector. All of the other people are involved in what we call the informal sector. They have to make money to stay alive, and so they literally do whatever they can to scrape a few pennies together.

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Really, when you think about what being out of poverty is, it’s about having money to invest in your future. You’re no longer worried about survival. You can now actually think about the future, and figure out how you’re going to get ahead. So, what do they do with this money? They do all sorts of things. Very, very many of them, actually, will use this money to start another business.

His advice for other social entrepreneurs…

I think, the number one bit of advice is if you are going to run a social enterprise to try to help people in developing countries you have to go to those developing countries. You have to spend time there. You have to understand the people. You have to understand the problem. You have to understand the marketplace. If you don’t do that, if you don’t take the time to do that, you will simply be coming with some outside solution, which really has no chance of being sustainable, no chance of really helping people.

Like I say, it is easy to put values on what we think a poor person’s number one need is, “Oh, clean water is by far their biggest need, or education, if they only had education everything would be great, or actually, health care is their number one need.” When you get there, and you talk to a poor person, you find out very quickly that a way to make more money is their number one need. If they have a way to make more money, all of these other things fall in line.

Believe me when I tell you the interview is four times as long so make sure you read it in full.