This article is the first in the Project 222 series on this blog. Project 222 is a Crab Media initiative to blog about charitable organizations on the 2nd day of the month, to donate 2 days a year to community service and to commit 2 percent of BLOG gross revenue (not blog-GER gross revenue at this time) to charitable work.

The charitable organization is one that, I suspect, will have some appeal both to bleeding hearts like me and the flintier conservatives among Maryland Weekly's readers as well. I refer to KickStart, Inc., Tax ID Number 06-1613235, a charitable organization headquartered legally and financially in San Francisco but with operations primarily in several African countries.

KickStart has an interesting approach for a non-profit organization. While it is a 501(c)(3) organization and cannot engage in activities with the primary end goal of "making money", its primary tool is a series of foot-powered water pumps called the "MoneyMaker," with the Super MoneyMaker Plus serving as their top of the line model.

Who wants a foot-powered water pump? Probably not the average North American farmer, who has tractors and gasoline and municipally pumped water in most cases or at least a reliable electric well. A Kenyan farmer, on the other hand, needs to haul water on a beast of burden, a wheelbarrow or the like from an off-the-grid creek, well or lake in most cases. Neither electricity nor gasoline nor pumped water is generally available. A foot-powered pump can increase the effective irrigation radius dramatically in such circumstances. While the wheelbarrow, etc, may be necessary still, the effective crop irrigation coverage is much broader when one is more or less using gravity, rather than fighting gravity, to deliver water to crops.

Rural Kenyans (and other rural Africans) are not used to forms of commercial mass marketing known all too well to Westerners, and one of the things that KickStart does is to market the devices effectively so that risk-averse, impoverished African farmers will trust in their utility. The website for KickStart promotes some pretty amazing figures for the GDP impacts of KickStart's activities in Kenya and Tanzania. In addition to the water pumps, KickStart markets oil presses for the small-scale production of cooking oil, as well as other technologies.

This organization's site is all about profit, cost-recovery, return on investment. I don't know enough about KickStart to know whether there may be some hidden downside, but distribution of oil presses and water pumps to subsistence or near-subsistence farmers sounds almost per se positive to me, especially if they are being distributed with the emphasis on profitability and cost-recovery to such farmers.