This Community-Run Business Creates A Sustainable Stream Of Food, Water, And Health

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, where nearly one in 10 children dies before the age of five and half the population lacks access to clean drinking water, the traditional approach to aid–donations–hasn’t worked very well. Despite tens of billions in international aid delivered to the country since the turn of the millennium, it’s still hard to find clean water. Health clinics regularly run out of medicine. After more than two decades of conflict, it keeps getting harder to get new donations to keep everything running.

A startup is piloting a new model of aid: a community-run business that sustains itself. Called Asili (the name means both “tradition” and “what holds us together” in a local language), it includes three interconnected parts. A farming cooperative gives loans of seeds and fertilizer and gives access to a guaranteed market for crops. With income from the farms, families can afford the Asili’s other two services–kiosks that sell clean water, and modern healthcare at clean, well-stocked clinics.

“We’re doing this in the hardest place in the world, and it’s working,” says Daniel Wordsworth, CEO of the American Refugee Committee, the aid organization that co-created the startup with USAID, Congolese community members, and the design firm Ideo.org.

Rather than focus on scale, Asili is focused on customer service, and providing a quality product that people are willing to pay for. “I think in our world, everyone thinks that our moonshot when it comes to humanitarian work is around scale,” Wordsworth says. “Whereas I think our moonshot is actually around intimacy. How do you have an organization or an approach or a service that is absolutely oriented to the customer?”

The community was involved in every aspect of the business creation, including the logo. Red–the color the ARC initially proposed–was rejected because it is used by local rebels. Green was associated with the military, and other colors were associated with political parties. Instead of choosing a single color, the logo uses red, yellow, blue, and green, to emphasize that the services are for everyone.

“Human-centered design is allowing us to be able to build with the community in mind, with the community at the center,” says Abraham Leno, the DRC country representative for the ARC, who manages Asili. “They are not just the way we used to position them as the beneficiary . . . Here your opinion matters. When that opinion feeds into their goals for themselves, their goals for future, their goals for community, then they know that we are serious about building something that would stay longer.”

Leno, who lived in a refugee camp himself as a teenager, believes that traditional humanitarian aid–while helpful for short-term crises–is both hard to sustain and disempowering. In a recent poll of Congolese citizens, a third of respondents said that the country would be better off without international NGOs.

Service at the clinics, designed with the goal that the American-based ARC staff would feel comfortable taking their own children there, is so respected locally that people from the nearby city of Bukavu have started coming to the villages to use them. “That’s really unprecedented–you would never leave the city to go to the country for that sort of thing,” Wyatt says.

Asili plans to continue expanding locally. There are currently three clinics, each surrounded by water kiosks, and a fourth clinic will come soon.

By putting three businesses together in each village–the clinics, the water kiosks, and the agriculture business–it helps reduce overall costs. “If you’re in Congo and you have to import stuff in, you have to hire your own customs person to sit on the border for two days a week, that’s going to kill you,” says Wordsworth. “But instead we could share the costs of one person to manage customs and the supply chain. Each business pays for it, but they only have to pay for a portion.”

The business model still has challenges to overcome. The water infrastructure, with 60 kilometers of pipeline, was expensive to build. Before recreating the system in other locations, the team hopes to find ways to lower the capital expense. But the business has proven that it can be operationally sustainable. And if it can work in the DRC, one of the poorest countries in the world, it’s likely it could work elsewhere.