Before founding ApproTEC, Martin Fisher earned his Ph.D. in engineering from Stanford.

The Daily: What’s the big idea behind ApproTEC?

Martin Fischer: ApproTEC is all about enabling poor people to make enough money to actually escape poverty. We do this by developing and mass marketing very low-cost capital equipment that people can buy and use to start profitable businesses.

TD: Your most popular products are water pumps. How can they alleviate poverty?

MF: We work in Africa, where 80 percent of poor people are farmers. These farmers have one asset, a small plot of land, and one basic skill, farming. The best business opportunity for them is to move from subsistence farming into farming cash crops.

Our manual irrigation pumps enable farmers to do exactly that. On average, when a farmer uses our pumps, he increases his income from $110 per year to over $1,100 per year. In Africa, that brings him from below the poverty line into the middle class.

TD: Why help the poor start private businesses? Why not provide direct aid?

MF: Our mission is to enable millions of families to escape from poverty. When we’re talking about poverty we’re talking about a lack of a way to make money.

We define poverty in a way that is very different from how people traditionally would. Traditionally, people talk about poverty as lack of clean water, lack of healthcare, lack of schooling and etc. But the bottom line is that nearly everyone in the world lives in a cash economy. If you have a way to make money, then you can afford all those other things.

TD: You’re critical of much of international development work. What’s the problem?

MF: One thing about development is that there seems to be a very short institutional memory. We really need to go back and learn the lessons of the past because I see the same mistakes made again.

Right now, we are back to thinking we can fly into a village and bring some piece of equipment, make it community owned and make a difference. That just won’t work.

Development is generally all about giving things away to communities and doing social engineering. We’ve realized it’s much better to sell things to individual people, using the existing private sector.

TD: How do you use the private sector in your own work?

MF: In our supply chain, everybody makes money. We have big manufacturers who mass-produce the pump equipment. We have wholesalers who make money selling it. We have 250 retail shops, in every little village, town and city in Kenya. They all make money. It’s a completely sustainable supply chain. When we walk away from it, people will be able to go back and get spare parts and get new equipment.

TD: You received a Ph.D. in engineering from Stanford. How did you end up as a social entrepreneur?

MF: After earning my doctorate, I went down to Peru on a vacation. That was my first experience being face-to-face with real poverty.

As an engineer, I just remember thinking that there has to be something we can do to change such a situation. I started researching the “appropriate technologies” movement in Kenya. I was supposed to go for 10 months, but I ended up staying for 17 years.

TD: Do you have any advice for students who are inspired by your work?

MF: Right now, it’s most important to prove these models can work. We need more appropriate technology models that work, are cost-effective and show sustainable impacts. In order to do this, people need to be very entrepreneurial and willing not to make a lot of money. It’s hard work to go out there and make it happen.

But once we do that, then we can actually start to eradicate poverty for a change.

If you’re interested in learning more about ApproTEC, go to www.approtec.org. Adam Stone and Lija McHugh are graduating this spring and will miss the many perks of being columnists. If you’re interested in these perks and writing the social innovation column next year, contact them at astone@stanford.edu or lmchugh@stanford.edu.