>> In the typical rural community,
children must wake up as early as 3:30, 4 AM.
And walk several kilometers to fetch in these containers because there's so
much you can carry.
And go several times everyday to try and
have access to what you would not call water at all.
[MUSIC]
My name is Samuel Appenteng, and
I'm the Managing Director of Joissam Ghana Limited.
Joissam is involved in groundwater exploration and
research, drilling of bore holes, water quality analysis, and
of course we treat the water where there's a need to do that.
I come from a family background where we have manufacturing concerns,
and I used to run the plants which manufactures IV fluids.
And there had been a war in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea.
Quite a number of people have been displaced.
And so on one fateful evening I had a call from one of the chaps there who said,
look, we have a problem with diarrhea, dysentery conditions, and
water sanitation problems are becoming a challenge.
So we would need some hand pumps and
I began to look for where do I get these things?
My wife, Efua, she's been with us in the business.
She has held the fort very strongly anytime I'm away, and
she controls the administration and then drives even the hand pumps sales.
I don't know what I would have done without her honestly,
because she has an eye for detail.
In Sub Saharan Africa over 320 million people have no access to potable water.
That tells you the scale of the problem.
As we went more and more into the rural communities and
saw the kind of deprivation and denials of decent living,
then I began to realize that look, we need to bring relief to people,
we need to bring some comfort to those who are really deprived.
In a very typical village setting,
when we move in there to do what we do, we call the community animation.
You've got to go there, and talk to the people there,
and tell them exactly what you intend to do.
Right from day one, they're already excited, welcoming you and
giving you all kinds of water.
And the water is actually colored, it's like a bit chalky, it's white.
And then they pass it to you and say, drink it.
Because in Africa you welcome people with water.
And you've got to close your eyes, and just also dip and just pass around.
You don't drink because obviously you know it's highly infested.
You would find that most communities they'll give you space and
say look, find it anywhere you want.
But our objective is to make sure that we shorten the distance between residence and
water source.
They will all come around and help you as you go and pass the lines to be able to
start sending electrical charges into the earth when you're measuring resistivity.
Then they will set up rig and then we start drilling.
At that point I can tell you, you will have everybody sitting down there,
observing, and there's a lot of tension.
And then the technical team are saying we are getting there.
You start getting a lot of excitement.
Believe you me, as soon as you hit water and it starts gushing out,
women and children start jubilating like it's a football game with a lot of goals.
What we take for granted in our urban communities, it's like gold for them.
In these typical villages they don't have access to electricity.
And so then we do the hand pumps.
And then we select one young lady and a young gentleman,
and we train them on how to do maintenance.
And we make sure that we are in contact with them,
to be able to find out how well their product is doing.
As soon as you have access to potable water in any community,
what it means is that it has economic benefits,
it has health benefits, and life generally becomes improved.
The company had gone through quite a lot of attempts at wanting to
grow the program of Seed has been extremely useful to us.
The tools made available to you to analyze your business model,
and to come up with ways in which you can grow.
In the year 2014, we were doing
something in the range of about 2 million.
And then we move from there to six point something million, and
then of course subsequently is been growing thereafter.
And this year we are looking forward to about 15 million plus in turnover.
That can only happen because the program has influenced the way we think,
and so we are still ready to learn a lot more.
We're not willing to separate at all from Stanford Seed,
we want to be together in this journey so we can move very far.
The vision of Joissam is defined clearly, that by 2025 we want to be
the number one provider of professional services for water in West Africa.
We want to be able to do solar connections to rural communities, so
deficient is very big.
We know we cannot do it alone, we would need partners,
we will need people who can invest in us.
We don't know where we will go thereafter, but
we just hope that we'll make as much impact as possible in the next ten years
on people who otherwise will not be there to see the 18th birthday.
People are just when they have the fundamentals right, life begins for them.
>> [FOREIGN]