What I find when I search for Approtec, the Expo 2000 project, is a company that promotes just one product: a water pump. Today the company is called Kickstart and their pump they call “Moneymaker”.  It is coming in two versions, the small one with one cylinder is hand operated, the larger one with two cylinders is Kickstart is a “social enterprise”,  a company not for making a profit. They collect money from individuals and organisations to market the pumps, to educate on the investment and to do follow-up-studies.

Nick Moon, and his co-founder Martin Fisher had worked for big development organizations. They disliked the models they saw, Moon told me: “What would happen is that for three or four years they would be pumping in money and technical and other forms of expertise into that very limited geographical area. They were developing or encouraging an artificial economy in that community or area which became more and more dependent on the continuing presence of that NGO.”

Eventually Moon and Fisher quit for their own venture. Meanwhile they estimate that the 250,000 pumps they sold have lifted around 900,000 people in 180,000 families out of poverty. They have expanded their operations from Kenya into many other African countries.