KICKSTART-INTERNATIONAL INC

KickStart is an award-winning not-for-profit organization with a revolutionary approach to ending poverty. We design, develop and promote simple money-making tools that poor entrepreneurs buy and use to create profitable family-run businesses. Our best selling products are human powered irrigation pumps that enable small scale farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa increase their crop yield and income by 10 times in one year. We have country programs in Kenya, Tanzania, Mali, Burkina Faso and Zambia, and export our products to 23 other countries in sub-Saharan Africa and 12 beyond the continent.Farmers use KickStart's MoneyMaker pumps to move from low-value subsistence farming to commercial irrigated agriculture, converting their farms into vibrant and profitable family businesses. With irrigation, they grow high-value crops and get high yields, and they grow multiple cycles of crops per year instead of just one or two. Most importantly they can now harvest and sell their crops during the long dry seasons when there are no other crops on the market and when prices are up to 10x higher than during the rain-fed harvest. Because they are the only famers with crops to sell in the dry season, marketing and selling the produce is easy - in fact much of the produce can be sold to neighbors directly at the farm gate. Farmers with irrigation can make a lot of money.To date KickStart has taken 125,000 families out of poverty and enabled 180,000 children to go to school. KickStart farmers are growing nutritious fruits and vegetables that are feeding some 8-10 million people, are using MoneyMaker pumps to generate ~USD$100,000,000 in new profits and wages each year. KickStart currently helps 80,000 additional people escape poverty every year and it is doubling its total annual impacts every three years.