The other highlight of the Investors Circle visit to Nairobi was the visit to the factory where BURN Manufacturing builds its cookstoves. Charcoal cookstoves, as charcoal is the most popular fuel used for cooking by urban and peri-urban Kenya. Factory, as in a fully-modern manufacturing facility, little different from those found in the U.S., Europe, Japan, or China. One large building filled...
Continuing my visit to impactful African startups, yesterday my fellow Investors Circle members met with three (very different) startups tackling global health. First was MicroEnsure, an established, multi-country startup that is working in a very difficult space, selling insurance to the bottom of the pyramid. The key learnings from the meeting were the successful channels for reaching that...
Continuing on the Investors Circle trip was a day trip to western Kenya to visit two of the eleven Afya Research Africa clinics. First, the Afya Ubuntu Ruma Clinic. The clinic is on the grounds of the Ruma Women’s Center, a nonprofit run by a local church which provides services to women and orphans. The picture above provides no understanding on the remoteness of this location. We flew...
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...
