Burro Teams Up with Stanford to Design for Extreme Affordability

The “Cassava Tech” team testing out their Gari roaster in Palo Alto

Burro has been chosen by Stanford University as one of five global partners for the school’s prestigious Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability program in 2013. This renowned multidisciplinary program pairs Stanford graduate students with innovative developing-world companies to design real-world solutions to problems facing low-income people.

The partnership will allow us to move forward rapidly with some new business and product ideas in rural Ghana.

 Over the next six months, eight Stanford students will work directly with Burro—on the ground in Ghana and in the U.S.—on two Burro design projects: “Ready to Run,” a portable battery business for off-grid entrepreneurs; and “Cassava Tech,” an initiative to identify efficiencies in harvesting and processing cassava, one of the world’s most important staple crops.

The “Cassava Tech” Team

The “Ready to Run” Team

Both projects have long been identified by Whit and his team as holding the potential for life-changing benefits in Ghana and beyond—but until now the Burro team did not have the resources or time to explore them. Starting in late March, the Stanford team, along with Burro’s own staff, will be fanning out around Koforidua and across Ghana—meeting with customers, resellers, and leading Ghanaian researchers to collaborate on these exciting new ideas.

 Burro Employee Cecilia Charging Batteries in Koforidua          

The nine-year-old Design for Extreme Affordability program, known on the Stanford campus as “Extreme,” is offered by the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design through the Graduate School of Business and the School of Mechanical Engineering. Like the 2007 Cooper-Hewitt Museum show Design for the Other 90 Percent, the Stanford program focuses on bridging the gap between modern design (which typically serves high-income Western consumers) and the needs of the world’s low-income families.

 An important component is demonstrating that innovative, life-enhancing design can be both affordable by the needy and profitable for businesses and entrepreneurs. The Extreme program helped jumpstart a world-leading supplier of solar lighting solutions, a provider of breakthrough drip-irrigation technology, and the leading provider of manual irrigation pumps in Southeast Asia. Among its partner “alumns” are such distinguished companies as Technoserve and iDE, a leader in the development of innovative technologies to enhance incomes.

 The selection of Burro follows months of preparation, during which Stanford faculty identified us as having both an intimate connection to the needs of low-income citizens, and the ability to implement design ideas on a large scale. (A rough cut video of course co-instructor Jim Patell’s field visit with Burro is here.) Of course that’s not news to us—it’s the core of our business plan—but it sure is gratifying to be recognized by this distinguished group. Finding needs and solutions are what get us out of bed every morning, and now we’ve got a world-class team working with us. Stay tuned to this page for more updates as the Extreme team gets to work next week in Ghana.

Darkness and Light

About half of Ghana’s 20 million people live without electricity, but that figure is actually deceptive. Outside of big cities, only about 16 percent of Ghanaians have electricity. To get an idea of the scale, check out this composite satellite photo of the earth at night:

Granted, some really dark areas, like the Sahara Desert and the Amazon jungle, simply have very few people. But equatorial Africa is teaming with hundreds of millions of people who are living in the dark.

That’s why battery and solar powered lights are such an exciting product here in Ghana.  The traditional method of getting light in the rural areas is Kerosene, but we’re certainly not the first to introduce battery-powered lights.  However, many of the lights that get sold in these areas have lots of problems.  They break when they fall, they break when they get wet, they break because the batteries inside them leak.  The Burro light doesn’t do any of that.

Burro Client Tettyka Moses shows off his new Burro light (left) that he got to replace his old light (right) when it broke.

Tettyka Moses recently switched to a Burro Light.  “It is more durable than others,” he said.  “This one doesn’t break when it falls.”

And he’s not the only one who’s satisfied.

“I can keep my shop open until 10pm,” said Faustina Frimpong.

“My children use it to learn at night,” said John Aryee.

“It makes me comfortable,” said Florence Yeboah.

These sorts of reviews from our clients make us proud to be able to serve them and help them to Do More.

Doing More

What do our clients do with the time and money they save using Burro products?  We asked them.

• “I use the extra money to buy more corn since I am a kenkey [tamale-like food staple] seller,” says Tetteh Babyio
• Doris Teye makes gari [an instant cassava-based porridge], and so she uses the extra money “to buy more cassava.” 
• “I use that time on the farm,” says Regina Kwame.
• Millicent Mantebea, a seamstress, said “I use the money for sewing (materials).”

Others use it to support their families:

• “I use the money for other things, like my children’s school,” says Akwetteh Humphrey.
• Ernest Nyarko uses extra time “to work at home.”
• “the stomach doesn’t go on holidays,” says Francis Opoku Akuffa, “I use the extra money to buy food and to pay (my children’s) school fees.”

And some use it to support themselves:

• “The money I save..I now use it to eat,” says Agnes Ntow.

As far as we’re concerned, these are all great ways to spend those extra resources.  Do More!

Why We’re a For-Profit Social Enterprise

Branch manager Rose Dodd helps customers with their cell phone chargers.

We often get asked (though never by Africans, tellingly) why Burro is a for-profit company, as opposed to a charity. Sometimes the question is posed rhetorically, as in: “Why are you trying to make money off of poor people?”

There are several ways to answer that question.  The first is that giving things away for free is easy: you find something nice, hand it over, and walk away.  As a for-profit enterprise, we are forced to care deeply about the quality of our products and services because if our customers don’t like them, we’re out of business. That means no shiny gimmicks, no quick fixes, and we have to stick with it for the long haul, because our brand depends on it.  If somebody living on less than $2 a day buys a Burro product, it must be worth every penny.

Another answer is that, by creating a real business, we’re also creating jobs for Ghanaians. So far we have over 200 part-time resellers.  These resellers are members of the rural communities we serve; in addition to selling Burro products, they are farmers and schoolteachers, among other occupations.  In addition, we have eight full-time employees, from our battery room technicians to our branch manager, all of whom hail from West Africa.  And the more money we make, the more jobs we’ll create.

Finally, there’s the sustainability argument. Because we generate cash flow, we don’t have to rely on the whims of donors. That means our customers needn’t worry that we’ll be gone next month, and we can spend the time we would have spent fundraising on building our business instead.

There is certainly a role for non-profits in society, and many of them do outstanding work right here in Ghana.  But the work we are doing here has the ability to reach more people more effectively with a for-profit model.