WaterHealth is leading ‘A Blue Revolution’, with a mission to provide safe water to the poorest communities. It also invests in health and hygiene education programs to help combat waterborne diseases in the communities it serves.

For me, the most interesting thing is that they intend to make a profit doing this. Their focus is on low maintenance requirements, high efficiency, and high throughput in order to create systems that deliver affordable, high-quality drinking water to previously underserved markets - often remote or rural communities in which women and girls travel for hours to collect water from safe sources.

After 11 years of experimentation and struggles, during which time they set up water purifying systems in India, Philippines, Mexico, South Africa and Sri Lanka, the 100-person company now thinks they’ve established the right business model to become profit-making by next year. To date they have evolved two ways of selling the water: (1) Community Water Systems, or (2) Water Store (pictured above).

Someone once told me that the best way to get a product out there is find ways for the middle men to make a buck. I suppose when the product is water, the same philosophy still applies. WaterHealth have developed a franchise model that makes distribution and marketing dead simple for a local entrepreneur. And according to Acumen Fund’s (one of the investors) figures, each franchisee can get a full return on investment within 12-18 months- making it an attractive opportunity.

Here, their CEO, Tralance Addy, explains the commitment to profiteering:

We’re motivated to do what we’re doing because of a huge need and huge suffering…. But unless we can bring private capital to bear on these problems, the solutions will not be sustainable…We are very much a for-profit company.”