EarthEnable Inc.

I am the Co-founder and CEO of EarthEnable, a social enterprise dedicated to making living conditions healthier for the world’s poor, first by eliminating dirt floors. Prior to founding EarthEnable, I worked at several international development organizations, within the private, public, and NGO sectors. I was a Senior Consultant at Dalberg Global Development Advisors. Before that, I worked at the Independent Evaluation Group of the World Bank conducting impact evaluations largely in agriculture. I have consulted for the Government of Liberia’s Department of Revenue, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the International Finance Corporation, and grassroots NGOs in India (tsunami relief work), Namibia (women’s health and empowerment), Nicaragua (microfinance), Albania (civil-society), and the United States (nonprofit consulting). I hold a BA in Economics from Harvard College, an MPA/ID from the Harvard Kennedy School, and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where I was an Arjay Miller Scholar.

EarthEnable is the first organization to offer rural families affordable, green solutions to the unsanitary homes which continually jeopardize their health. A typical 25 sqm cement floor costs about $250 in East Africa, while the average cost of our earthen floors is only $75. Earthen floors are much more environmentally sustainable than cement--producing 90% fewer carbon emissions to produce and construct. By delivering these floors and our other environmentally sustainable, earthen products, we provide one-time interventions that allow our clients to live in healthy, sanitary homes. We aim to create long-term reductions in illness and healthcare costs to improve quality of life and economic productivity. 

To deliver our products, we hire and train unemployed and underemployed masons, enabling them to increase their incomes while serving their communities. All of our materials are locally sourced and adapted based on what is available in the area, which makes our solution widely scalable. 

Approximately 1.4 billion people worldwide (including 75% of Rwandans, 65% of Ugandans) live and sleep on dirt floors, which have been shown to be a major cause of diarrhea, parasitic infections, respiratory diseases, malnutrition, and anemia. Replacing a dirt floor with a clean one has been shown to reduce diarrheal disease by 49% and parasitic infections by 78%. Unfortunately, concrete - the cheapest dirt floor alternative - is too expensive for these 1.4 billion people and creates tremendous carbon emissions. Cement production is responsible for 8% of total global carbon emissions and is incredibly energy and water-intensive to produce. EarthEnable aims to solve this problem by making affordable, environmentally friendly earthen housing products available to rural families. 

The importance of a clean home is especially relevant in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. There is evidence that dust from a floor can spread viruses and infect people when inhaled and, conversely, having a sealed and cleanable floor reduces the spread of viruses within rural homes. Furthermore, pre-existing diseases caused by dirt floors (e.g. respiratory infection and diarrhea) make pandemics like COVID-19 more fatal to families who live in homes with dirt floors.

EarthEnable’s business model provides affordable housing products to the rural poor, at a fraction of the cost of cement and traditional construction products. Our business model is based around our method of training local masons to construct earthen products using local earthen materials and our proprietary, plant-based sealant.

Through grassroots R&D we have developed a process for using sand, clay, and gravel within walking distance of customer homes to build a healthy floor and earthen plaster. After we use these materials to create a foundation and a smooth top layer, we apply our sealant, which hardens and waterproofs our products. 

To deliver these solutions we transform underemployed local masons into flooring entrepreneurs that learn how to sell earthen products to individuals in their community, attain necessary materials nearby, and construct a high-quality floor with oversight from the EarthEnable team. 

We are already in 13 districts in Rwanda and 4 in Uganda and have been scaling rapidly in recent years. In 2019 alone, we achieved 150% growth, served over 11,632 individuals, and achieved a 97% customer satisfaction rate. Since our founding in 2015, we have served over 25,000 individuals. 

Our primary beneficiaries are individuals who live in rural Uganda and Rwanda in homes with dirt floors. They are typically smallholder farmers or workers in the informal labor sector and many have young children. These clients have reported to us that when they purchase our floor they enjoy improved household health, decreased healthcare expenditures, spend less time cleaning the house and washing clothes--tasks that can take hours a day for families with a dirt floor, and appreciate the beauty of their homes.

In order to understand the needs of and successfully engage the communities we serve, we’ve built our team and our products using local knowledge. Over 90% of our team grew up in the communities we serve. In fact, several of our staff are former customers. Our product development is driven by the insights we obtain from our masons, because they best understand earthen construction and the local materials available. It is the voices of our customers, team members, and masons that helped us reduce the price of our flooring product, develop our new plaster product, and improve customer service in 2019. We understand our field colleagues are the closest to our customers and therefore their best advocates. 

The customers we serve understand that dirt floors are detrimental to their health and livelihood and the masons we employ are hardworking, skilled laborers in need of employment. EarthEnable seeks to leverage this demand for earthen floors, the capacity of local laborers, and the materials available within rural communities to develop an earthen construction industry. By providing an affordable, sustainable floor, we give rural families access to the beautiful, healthy homes they desire. By training local masons to sell and install our floors, we give them the chance to improve their community and increase their economic opportunities.

I co-founded EarthEnable in 2014. I was part of a group of Stanford students who visited Rwanda in 2014 and recognized that dirt floors are a threat to family health. While conducting further research on alternatives we found that concrete floors were the only available flooring option in rural areas of developing countries, but that families were unable to afford concrete floors. As we researched alternatives, we came across earthen floors, which were a niche type of flooring in the United States. Most of the materials comprising an earthen floor like rocks, sand, and clay could always be found in villages, but the sealant necessary to bind these materials together was prohibitively expensive. As a result, we embarked on a mission to engineer an oil-based floor sealant that would be both environmentally friendly and more affordable. The result was EarthEnable’s now proprietary flaxseed based varnish that is used as floor sealant by several hundred masons and floormen to install earthen floors for rural families.

Since co-founding that company in 2014, I have helped build it into a thriving business that is active across Rwanda and Uganda and employs 594 individuals.

A major reason I am so passionate about EarthEnable is the fact that it is a much-needed product that no one has tried to develop in Africa before. We believe a big reason that it hasn’t been done is that it satisfies a very basic and unglamorous need. There is also a true and meaningful impact that a clean floor can have on a family’s life, especially regarding their health. Clean floors have been shown to improve cognitive development in children and mental health in adults. In addition to these physical benefits for children, having a clean floor in the home has been shown to have mental health benefits for mothers because it reduces their stress and depression. I am motivated by offering a scalable solution to the substantial unmet need for clean, durable, and affordable floors throughout the developing world.

During my time at the Stanford d school, I learned about the concept of human-centered design: the key to designing and improving a product is identifying genuine human needs through empathy and understanding of the individuals within a target market. I have infused this method of thinking in EarthEnable’s culture, which has led to us developing products based upon the needs, circumstances, and capabilities of rural communities in East Africa. 

Our company is made up of and driven forward by individuals from the rural communities we serve. 541 of our 594 employees serve their home communities. Rather than force our beneficiaries to adopt western methods of construction, we leverage the knowledge of earthen construction already available in villages. We are driven by customer needs. While we were successful in selling to customers across Rwanda and Uganda up until 2019, our customers and potential customers told us that further reducing our price was the key to increased sales. As a result, in 2019, we worked with local masons to successfully reduce our transportation costs by developing a process to identify suitable construction materials within walking distance of customer homes. Our micro-franchise business model empowers these masons to independently, profitably sell and deliver this lower-cost product to their community. Our human-centered process for delivering our product and improving our company empowers local communities to build an earthen flooring industry. This mindset makes us uniquely positioned to eliminate dirt floors in rural communities across the world.

In the early days of EarthEnable, as we strove to design a new type of plant-based sealant to optimize earthen flooring for rural communities, we faced and overcame a litany of design challenges to create our flagship flooring product. 

Thanks to our human-centric design process, we quickly noticed the impact that an affordable floor could have on the lives of rural individuals. However, it took us time to recognize that earthen flooring was optimal for rural environments given the availability of gravel, sand, and clay in rural villages, and even longer to design a working prototype. When I went to Rwanda to test our floor, I told myself that I would stay if the pilot floor showed promise. The pilot floor failed, but I stayed in Rwanda nonetheless. It was only after months of experimenting with different types of gravel, sand, and clay and over 50 different iterations of sealant that we successfully created pilot earthen floors in rural Rwanda. Throughout the process, we overcame these barriers through a commitment to experimentation and the impact our project could have on rural families. Still today our company is infused with an experimental ethos and a commitment to our mission. 

When I was 19 years old, I was visiting family in India when the 2004 Tsunami struck the southeast coast of India. The devastation all over the news was overwhelming. I went back to the US, extremely distracted. Two months later, I had taken a semester off from college and was on a bus to a village in southern India called Cuddalore, volunteering with a local NGO that had already been working in the devastated area before the Tsunami.  It was quickly clear that I knew absolutely nothing, and was more of a burden than a help given that I was totally out of my element.  After a few days observing, listening, and learning, I noticed that they had limited funds and a massive population to serve, and I had a skill that could be very helpful: fluency in English. For the next three months, I worked 14 hours a day translating their visions into grant applications, and their impact into reports, ultimately raising over a million dollars to rebuild homes and support other humanitarian relief. This is where I discovered my life’s passion, and learned that tremendous impact comes from leading by following.

Before EarthEnable launched in 2014, there was no affordable flooring option for poor rural households. Generally, for the past 100 years, rural families have relied on the same substandard homes that are structurally unsound, unsanitary, aesthetically unpleasant, and require significant maintenance each year. Historically, the poverty of rural consumers, the difficulty of transporting construction materials on poor quality rural roads, and lack of training available to local construction workers impeded the development of affordable housing solutions.

EarthEnable is changing the system by introducing ultra-affordable housing products that we develop in partnership with local masons, utilizing local materials. Rather than leaning away from the (largely free) materials that the rural poor are currently building with - earth and natural fibers - we believe in embracing and improving earthen construction methods. As a result, we can train underemployed rural masons to become flooring entrepreneurs who can build a quality earthen floor using materials within walking distance of customer homes, and our proprietary plant oil sealant that converts these materials into a floor that is as good as cement! These micro-franchisees are able to profit from each floor they build, and we believe profitability will help spur replicators and in turn an earthen construction industry. We are proud that our innovative use of earthen construction has put us in position to improve health outcomes across Rwanda and Uganda, but we achieved this innovation only through our focus on unleashing the vast entrepreneurial potential and knowledge that already exists in rural communities.

Our vision is to catalyze an industry for affordable housing improvement by building a sustainable business model that can be replicated at mass scale. We will transform rural homes to spur a virtuous cycle of positive health rather than the current cycle of morbidity. Every day we see the current cycle in action: because there are no affordable alternatives to living in an unsanitary home, rural families get diseases, are less able to productively earn income, and cannot invest in improving their homes. We see ourselves as an industry builder, with the goal of removing the barriers to entry for future organizations and companies to scale our impact. We believe that one enterprise cannot solve the issue of unsanitary housing, but that an industry can solve this problem. 

To achieve that vision, we have developed products that meet rural construction needs and a business model for delivering those products at minimal cost and maximum quality. We’ve already developed an earthen floor and earthen plaster and are now working on an earthen roofing product. We have only been able to develop this diverse array of earthen housing products by combining the innovative earthen construction methods utilized in villages with our rigorous R&D testing and design methods. We have further unleashed the potential of communities and local masons by increasingly decentralizing construction oversight and training masons to become micro-franchisees responsible for selling and building our floors. We maintain construction oversight to ensure the quality of products, but we have already seen micro-franchisees take responsibility for quality standards out of a desire to develop their personal brand. By continuing to develop products and empowering micro-franchisees to deliver those products, we believe that EarthEnable can eventually shift towards becoming a knowledge provider – working with on-the-ground partners to establish and sell our product in new countries and communities. 

To date, EarthEnable has served 25,200 people. We will have served over 35,000 people one year from now and an additional 567,000 individuals in the next five years.

EarthEnable envisions a thriving and sustainable rural housing industry that addresses unsanitary living conditions. Our social enterprise approach sells and distributes affordable housing products to the rural poor. We aim to develop a business model that is long-term sustainable and that reaches the base of the pyramid. We believe that one company cannot solve the problems of substandard housing alone, but jump-starting an entire industry can.

As we commit to a franchise model, drive down our costs, and consistently increase our year over year profitability by 12.8%, we will incentivize replicators to deploy our model in new communities. We will offer these replicators knowledge and training needed to build earthen flooring franchises in new communities. These replicators will act as master-franchisees: entrusted to build relationships in local communities, certify local masons as micro-franchisees, and provide oversight of construction quality.

In the next year, despite the impact of COVID-19 on our business, we plan to build 2503 in calendar year 2020 and 8,900 in calendar year 2021.

In the next 5 years, we expect to:

• Serve over 120,000 households (approximately 567,000 people) and drastically improve their health and living conditions by installing sustainable housing products

• Scale to at least 103 district teams across 3 countries via spurred replicators that are operating as networks of micro-franchises

• Triple the incomes of 700 micro-franchise owners

• Spur an industry of affordable and environmentally sustainable housing products that enable vibrant rural villages

When EarthEnable was first founded in 2014, myself and other managers were able to exercise direct control over construction processes and the materials used due to our small scale. However, in order to achieve scale, we have steadily decentralized control from headquarters to district teams and now from district teams to micro-franchisees. Increasing decentralization in 2019 was a key driver of our 150% growth that year and our customer satisfaction improved to 97%! 

Despite the success we have attained through increased decentralization, we first piloted micro-franchising as recently as 2019. The pilot was extremely successful. We found that at the reduced micro-franchise price, 35% of customers purchased the product, as opposed to our usual take-up rate of 5% in new districts. However, a micro-franchise business model also poses risks. Under a micro-franchise model, masons will be entrusted to build quality floors with less oversight and more independence.  

It was in recognition of these risks that we planned to slowly pivot our existing operations to the micro-franchise model over the course of 2020 and 2021. However, the outbreak of COVID-19 has forced us to rapidly pivot to micro-franchising because it decreases costs for the customers and the company and ensures building can continue even if movement is limited. While this rapid pivot will make us more resilient to COVID and will allow us to achieve our five-year goals, we will have to ensure we find diligent franchisees who live up to quality standards. 

In order to find diligent franchisees, we will develop and leverage partnerships with community leaders and other organizations to find and vet franchisees. In order to ensure those who do become franchisees maintain quality standards, we have developed a quality assurance program that assures floors cannot be finished until the floor meets quality standards. 

EarthEnable already prioritizes developing partnerships with government officials, community leaders, and individual community members in order to successfully identify and vet potential masons. We also rely heavily on referrals from teammates who have proven themselves. We will continue to diligently build partnerships in any community prior to franchising and leverage our partnerships to find and vet new micro-franchisees.

In order to hold micro-franchisees accountable for the quality of construction, EarthEnable Quality Assurance staff will still control the varnish, which is the final step of the floor. Newly certified micro-franchisees will have all their floors evaluated by QA staff before EarthEnable applies varnish on the micro-franchisee’s floor. This process ensures that if there is an issue with the floor, it will be fixed before it is varnished. Even then, EarthEnable will still conduct random checks and conduct customer surveys to assure the micro-franchisees are meeting quality standards. Micro-franchisees who consistently fail checks risk demotion or termination. This rigorous quality assurance evaluation will ensure we are delivering quality floors and satisfying our customers.

We have developed strong partnerships with local governments, local leaders, and the national governments in Uganda and Rwanda. In addition, we have developed strong partnerships with USAID, Grand Challenges Canada, and Catholic Relief Services, to attain funding and help build inroads in the communities we serve. Partnerships with large organizations like USAID (and hopefully MIT), national governments, and local governments build confidence in the quality of our products and support the proliferation of earthen construction methods. In order to scale our franchise model, we will have to rely on our partners to help us identify potential micro-franchisees. Currently, we use our strong partnerships with community leaders and successful masons to build our brand and recruit new masons. 

Our partnership with the Rwandan government exemplifies how our partnerships help us to build an earthen flooring industry. Up until 2018, earthen construction was technically illegal in Rwanda, even though it was used in villages across the country. The reason for this discrepancy was that Rwandan law required a legal standard for earthen construction and such no standard existed. In 2018, we formed the Local Building Materials Think Tank with the Rwandan government to successfully write this standard. We are continuing to work with this Think Tank to develop earthen construction standards in Rwanda and help enable the country to build improved earth structures.

No one understands the value that affordable flooring, plaster, and other housing products provide better than our customers. Our customers inhale dust when they sleep on dirt floors, spend hours trying to clean their homes and clothes, and watch their family members get sick from respiratory diseases and parasites. Furthermore, no one understands earthen construction better than our masons, who build our floors and have been using earthen construction to build homes in their village their entire lives. Our business model is centered around leveraging this demand and knowledge to use earthen solutions to build sanitary homes. 

The micro-franchise business model we are implementing across Rwanda and Uganda allows us to focus on building our brand, minimizes our costs, and empowers masons to become flooring entrepreneurs. Under this model district teams build relationships with community members and local governments to help publicize our brand, train qualified micro-franchisees in their district to construct and sell our floors, and work with HQ to assure micro-franchisees build high-quality floors that leave customers satisfied with EarthEnable’s service. The trained micro-franchise masons are trusted to attain cheap materials locally and pushed to care so deeply about quality that they increasingly become their own supervisors. EarthEnable makes money by selling the masons varnish to finish floors and plaster. Masons work out a contract with the customer to profit from their labor, and customers enjoy affordable, sanitary housing products. 

Even though we’re a relatively new enterprise, we’re striving to be financially self-sustaining by lowering the cost of our product and decreasing overhead. Achieving financial sustainability is pivotal to our continued success as an organization, will encourage other organizations to replicate our business model, and thus lead to a profitable, thriving earthen construction industry. 

To attain impact at scale, lower our costs, decrease overhead, increase sales, and become profitable we believe there are five concrete activities we need to do:

1. Continue driving down costs of affordable housing products through Research & Development

2. Increase our sales by offering financing

3. Develop new high-impact products that leverage our capabilities 

4. Fully implement and scale our micro-franchise model to decentralize our district overhead structure to a network of proven and trusted masons

5. Replicate this model through master-franchises in new regions to get to scale

1. USAID (DIV Stage 2 one-time award spread over 2018-2021): 1.8M USD

2. DOEN Foundation (via Green Challenge Prize, a one-time award from 2017): 590,000 USD

3. Grand Challenges Canada (one-time award spread over 2018-2019): 356,686 USD 

4. Sint Antonius Stichting (one-time award spread over 2019-2021: 544,886 USD

5. Mulago Foundation (2016-2019): 200,000 USD/year

EarthEnable will require roughly 1m USD per year for 2021-2027 (our last loss-making year). In 2020, our budget is nearly double this, due to costs related to COVID and the costs of transition our team to the new micro-franchise model (training, maintaining much of the team in their current districts to manage the transition before shifting them to new districts, and R&D on new proprietary products). Given the uncertainty in the fundraising landscape due to COVID (some of our funders have had to pull back commitments), we are anticipating that existing donors will be able to fund 850K USD/year for at least the next 2 years. Elevates’ grant would directly enable us to successfully completely Phase 1 of our pivot and catapult towards Phase 2.

Our total estimated net profit and loss for 2020 is $1.9M. This includes the revenue from our operations, the cost of running all of our districts, the global overhead we incur, and the costs of pivoting to our new micro-franchise business model.

The COVID 19 pandemic forced EarthEnable to shut down our business for almost three months and the global economic downturn will decrease the purchasing power of our customers. Despite these setbacks, as an agile, innovative company, we are not letting this crisis go to waste! We have cast aside our original plans for the remainder of 2020 and now plan to rapidly pivot to our new low cost, micro-franchise business model. 

We are seeking $300,000 to fund retrainings of our existing masons or trainings of new masons in micro-franchise practices, retrain and refocus our current middle management staff to better support the micro-franchise business model, and hire new staff to vet new micro-franchisees and assure quality. These activities will help us to achieve our rapid pivot to a micro-franchise model. By Q1 2021, we expect to have successfully pivoted 5 districts to our new micro-franchise model, standardized our process for opening a franchise based district, and thus begin the process of shifting all of our districts to the micro-franchise model by the beginning of 2022.

Elevate’s $300,000 prize would help us permanently shift our company to a lower-cost model. By giving us this prize, Elevate will help us to ensure the longevity of our company, empower thousands of underemployed masons to become entrepreneurs, and help deliver environmentally friendly, health flooring to families across East Africa.

Under our new model, we hope to work with partners to scale our business to new regions.

We plan to demonstrate the viability of our new micro-franchise model in the next two years and then find partners who want to implement the model in their own region of expertise. These on the ground partners could act as master-franchisees, using their existing networks to find masons to certify as micro-franchisees and assuring these micro-franchisees build our products according to quality standards. We would support these partners with training and knowledge. 

The following types of organizations could act as our master-franchisees: Governments of countries with at least ⅓ of the population living on dirt floors; large housing NGOs like Habitat for Humanity and UNHCR; and large water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) organizations like UNICEF WASH or Sanitation and Water for All. We are open to a variety of partnerships to help spread our solution to as many communities as possible. We have been working for years to develop the products and business model that will serve as the basis for an affordable, sanitary housing industry. With our recent innovations decreasing the costs of our product and our pivot to a micro-franchise business model, we are confident that we are on the cusp of completing that foundation. The partners we list above can help spread our model to rural communities across the world and improve the livelihood of millions.