Entrepreneurship & Engineering

I've discovered pleasant similarities between entrepreneurship and engineering, but first some background.

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The project is going well, in short.

We've all but established a distribution network for point of use water filters in the villages surrounding towns. An NGO we're working with has womens' self help groups in 250 villages (3500 groups total, 300 of which are seen on a regular basis) and they are going to have their field staff give demonstrations of the water filters to the womens' groups and offer to sell them to them. We're going to tag along to some at first to help the sale (because people are excited by foreigners, honestly) and the NGO will make a small margin on the filters to help them fund their operations and expenses, while providing a useful service to the womens' groups and hopefully improving people's health and well-being.

We're also expanding the education curriculum put into place last summer to teach 6th and 7th graders (children here are markedly less mature and educated than their U.S. counterparts, partly because of nutrition and the quality of education honestly) to teach them about health, hygiene, sanitation, and water (really, the links between them). The theory, then, is that this builds awareness to help encourage families to take a stake in empowering themselves to be aware of and address their water problems. This will lead to either...

...a small business that sells point of use water filters are low cost. This will be a profitable enterprise that will ensure that the owner(s) have financial incentive to continue to sell, maintain, and repair filters in the community. With the right level of awareness, this will allow anyone in the community to control their family's health through the proper stewardship of their water.

OR

...a small business that operates a community level water treatment facility that sells water for cents on the liter whenever people want it. This may also be coupled with an optional delivery service, but that has yet to be decided.

We're going to do some research, conduct meetings with the appropriate people, and talk to the community to learn about what the best course of action is.

This is all very exciting, and I'm really getting into the spirit of entrepreneurship. I see that business has great power to do good in the world, and that engineering without the business aspect accomplishes nothing. Both engineering and entrepreneurship are ways to solve problems -- the combination of the two is a potent force.