Social entrepreneurship: definitions, models, and impact

Social Entrepreneurship

The Nuba Water Project

The Nuba Water Project (NWP) was co-founded by Ibrahim A. Agor and Steve Riley in the early 2000s. Born in Sudan, Ibrahim is a refugee of the civil war in the Nuba Mountains in the 1990s. He fled that violence with his family in 2000, and they resettled in Egypt. Later, he and his wife and three young daughters emigrated to the United States so that he could complete a graduate degree in electrical engineering at the University of Colorado. Steve Riley is an American citizen, and spent most of his career working in the insurance industry and spending his free time volunteering in the refugee housing sector. In this volunteer capacity, he became acquainted with Sudanese refugees in Denver where he met Ibrahim. The combined experience these two men bring to the project create a passion for helping some of the planet's poorest people.

Based on the belief that access to clean water is a fundamental human right, the NWP's mission is to improve the quality of life for people living in the Nuba region of Sudan through the provision of sustainable sources of clean water. Staff affiliated with the Project work hard to "rely on the Nuba peoples' own spirit of independence, resourcefulness and hard work in the creation of economically sound, self-sustaining water projects." (www.nubawaterproject.org). In this way, the NWP takes a very specific issue, the provision of clean water supplies, and applies it to a very specific region of the world, the Nuba Mountains in Sudan. Larger goals for the organization are based on their conviction that once a group of people has guaranteed access to clean water, they will be better able to achieve larger community development goals including education, sanitation, public health, and infrastructure.

As a 501(c)3 organization, the NWP relies entirely on fundraising and donations for its revenue. The organization's website allows visitors to donate, and the group holds occasional local events in Denver, Colorado, where they are based. Their largest fundraising event each year is the Walk for Sudan. Hundreds of Denver residents pay to walk 5K, and in the process they are educated about war, poverty, and other realities facing the Sudanese. The majority of the NWP staff work as volunteers in the U.S., thereby reserving most of their revenue for project use (rather than administration). Local Sudanese are paid when the group arrives to install new infrastructure.

Building water infrastructure does by its very nature involve elements of design. Western sanitation facilities, for example, are expected to be white, clean, and indoors. In the United States, for example, we expect every home to have its own faucet and running water. In Sudan, however, the expectations for design and infrastructure are different. By working directly in local communities and employing residents to help with every phase of planning and construction, the NWP is able to capture local design features. Many water projects in the Sudan are outdoors, since many residents are transient or housed in temporary homes. Water taps are more likely to be centrally located so that surrounding homes can share access. Women, notorious for being the primary water-gatherers in Africa, may in fact benefit from the social nature of shared access to water; gathering with ones neighbors in the daily ritual of fetching water may provide critical community cohesion. Thus, while design is not an explicit piece of the NWP's work, their approach to the challenge does incorporate elements of design.