Durable water pumps by young entrepreneurs in Sierra Leone
Hi!
We are Hannah, Daniel, and Hidde. We are three students who will travel together to Sierra Leone to improve water pumps and conduct a market survey at schools. We do this as part of our minor ‘International entrepreneurship and development’ at TU Delft. We do this in collaboration with the company SEP-SL (Strategic Entrepreneurship Program Sierra Leone). The vision of this social enterprise is to stimulate entrepreneurship in Sierra Leone, focusing mainly on safe drinking water, agriculture, and the textile sector.
Your help is greatly needed to realize our project! SEP-SL has been able to place fourteen pumps in recent years, but the water pumps in Freetown need some attention. Currently, 90% of these pumps are not functioning as they should. They are made by local residents without proper quality control and tools. This causes many pumps to break down quickly. The pumps are not well maintained due to the high costs for both purchase and maintenance, this is one of the challenges we will tackle in our project.
To address this issue, we will personally travel to Sierra Leone in early November to contribute to this project. We will visit two different schools to repair their water pumps and develop a sustainable operational model with them. This reduces the chance of future problems and allows the pumps to be repaired on site. It is important to note that the costs for vaccinations and plane tickets have skyrocketed. That’s why we have chosen to use part of the crowdfunding for these two cost items. In addition, the proceeds from this crowdfunding will go towards researching, repairing, and improving the water pumps.
For this we need your contribution:
- Parts of the water pump
- Transportation costs to schools in Freetown
- Workshop on rope pumps (Werkgroep OntwikkelingsTechnieken)
- A portion of the vaccinations and plane tickets
It would be very nice if you could help us with this mission, thank you in advance!
SEP is passionate about harnessing and changing the mindset of Sierra Leoneans to see entrepreneurship as a viable and valuable career path. Through training, coaching activities, and lobbying for start-up capital on and off the SEP campus, they help young entrepreneurs contribute to development in agriculture, clean drinking water, and the textile sector. This subsequently promotes employment and economic development in Sierra Leone.
Abubakarr Bangura, the founder of SEP-SL, fled to the Netherlands twenty years ago due to the civil war in his native Sierra Leone. Since then, he has been involved in development work and founded SEP-SL. The company currently runs a local sewing workshop where students gain experience and learn about starting a business, in addition, they support farmers in the interior to get a higher yield and sell water pumps at a fair price to the residents of the capital Freetown.
