Nothing is more essential to life than clean drinking water. Where it’s in short supply—as in much of Africa and other developing regions—there’s opportunity for promoting good health, improving livelihoods, and making money. Jibu seeks to achieve all three through its franchises that treat, package, and distribute affordable water in the major cities of East Africa. For Jibu, selling water is ultimately a means to the end of spreading economic opportunity for the continent’s aspiring entrepreneurs.
A father-and-son team, Randy and Galen Welsch, started Jibu in 2012. The social enterprise is now a leading purveyor of bottled water in four countries and growing rapidly in three more. This episode traces the venture from:
- their early brainstorming sessions (03:59) to
- the failure of their pilot project in all three initial countries (05:54),
- the design of compact equipment tailored for developing markets (11:29),
- their priorities on recruiting women franchisees and employees to promote gender equity (17:24),
- structuring payment terms to make the franchise opportunity affordable to African entrepreneurs (25:52),
- and empowering local owners to make decisions that are key to growth and sustainability (29:36).
Additional Resources:
Source articles for this episode include:
- Progress on Household Drinking Water, Sanitation and Hygiene, the WHO’s latest data on water access around the world.
- Africa’s Cities: Opening Doors to the World, a World Bank report on the challenges faced by the continent’s urban centers.
- Africa’s Urbanization Dynamics 2020, an analysis by the OECD of policy options for the development of African cities within their local contexts.
The full transcript of the episode is below.
* * *
Jonathan Levine 00:09
Fresh out of college, Galen Welsch wanted to see the world. So he joined the Peace Corps and got posted to southern Morocco, where he worked on health and water projects with some NGOs. But after a while, he began to realize something.
Galen Welsch 00:24
I found sort of a misconnect between the resources available and what people cared about, what people's dreams were and what they really wanted in life: meaningful employment and an ability to, you know, start your own business and send your kids to school and feed your family. So I came away from that experience in Morocco thinking, you know, this is actually the most critical thing to solve. And business is one of the most powerful tools to actually make a difference.
Jonathan Levine 00:52
Back home in Colorado, his dad was on a parallel track. Randy Welsch had recently sold a tech business and was working as a consultant on nonprofit water projects. He traveled extensively in Africa. And he'd sometimes give money to families in need he met along the way. Short-term help, he calls it, but it didn't change lives. Then, he tried giving seed money to a few small businesses.
Randy Welsch 01:16
And we're talking amounts of, you know, $500, maybe $100, sometimes just to have someone start a small business in these places. And I'd come back the next year and to my surprise, in every case, they not only had done what I thought they would do, they would launch a couple other businesses out of that, and employ folks. And I just came to the conclusion, there's got to be business solutions to poverty.
Jonathan Levine 01:43
From the Stanford Social Innovation Review at Stanford University, this is Uncharted Ground—stories about the people at the forefront of global development and their journeys in social innovation. I'm Jonathan Levine. Back in 2012, Galen and Randy Welsch were kicking around ideas for a project they could do together. Galen had just returned from the Peace Corps. Randy was at loose ends too. And after a couple of years of brainstorming, they hit on a concept with not one but two social missions: to democratize access to safe, affordable drinking water in Africa's booming cities, while also creating economic opportunity for a new generation of entrepreneurs. And they would do it all as a for-profit business that would make the whole thing sustainable. In the world of social enterprise, you don't get much closer to a perfect model than that.
Jonathan Levine 02:47
There's nothing more essential to life than water. And yet, for many in the developing world, clean water is a luxury that only the rich can afford. According to the World Health Organization, almost 800 million people around the globe lack access to basic drinking water. About half of them live in sub-Saharan Africa. And that number has gotten worse in the past 20 years, not better. Matt Hangen is president and CEO of Water4, an NGO that installs water pumps and piping on the continent.
Matt Hangen 03:19
The impact of unsafe water is tremendous. We often think that because there's a lot of people living in places without safe water that they must be getting used to it. People aren't getting used to it. They're suffering and dying from diarrheal disease...
Jonathan Levine 03:32
...as well as from cholera, typhoid, and other diseases linked to unsafe water and poor sanitation. Children under five are particularly at risk. But before Galen and Randy Welsch ever hit on clean water and its health benefits as a business venture, their brainstorming started at a more fundamental level. My colleague, Adeline Sire, followed the Welsches' venture and picks up their story from here.
Adeline Sire 03:59
From the start, Galen says they wanted their project to be a for-profit business, not an NGO, but with a charitable mission built around a basic human need.
Galen Welsch 04:10
It's important to start a business or create an entrepreneurship opportunity for a critical need. We wanted to create a solution for something essential.
Randy Welsch 04:18
He says I said it first, I say he said at first, as in 'maybe let's do something together in the water sector.' We didn't know what that meant. We knew that it had to be innovative and different than what we both had experienced.
Galen Welsch 04:32
And drinking water was sort of an obvious choice because it's a phenomenon worldwide, the lack of access to drinking water.
Adeline Sire 04:39
Randy and Galen traveled between Colorado and East Africa, working on a pilot to supply safe drinking water in a way that would be sustainable in emerging markets. They settled on a plan for franchises and retail stores to sell water at an affordable price. And in the process, provide opportunities for aspiring entrepreneurs.
Galen Welsch 05:03
We install a water treatment system in a high-visibility retail front that enables an entrepreneur to take water from any source, treat it, package it in a reusable bottle, and then distribute to that one or two-kilometer area right around their franchise.
Adeline Sire 05:18
They planned to operate in both urban and rural areas. But when they began interviewing potential partners in East African cities, they suddenly saw the critical need for safe water in urban settings and made it a priority.
Galen Welsch 05:33
That moment when we did the first site visit with a potential entrepreneur and said, wait a minute, this is just in the middle of the city in a very dense area. That's when we started thinking differently about what the problem is in the first place. That's when the model radically shifted. We said actually, this entire, you know, majority of the population in urban areas has not even been served yet!
Adeline Sire 05:54
To test their pilot in 2013, Randy says they set up three franchises in three countries:
Randy Welsch 06:01
Uganda, Rwanda, and DR Congo, because we assumed that two out of the three experiments would fail and that we would learn from our failures as much as our successes. We had limited time and money, and we figured we could double down then if there was one that worked. And everybody said it was crazy at the time, 'you just don't do this simultaneously.' This is why we did it on our own nickel because even to try to get friends and family investing in something that you say has a high likelihood of failing altogether, let alone two out of three, was a crazy concept.
Adeline Sire 06:38
Crazy or not, they invested a half-million dollars of their own money. They organized the venture as a low-profit limited liability company known as an L3C—a for-profit business with a social mission. That made it easier to raise money from both private investors and philanthropic foundations. Since they started in 2012, they've raised about $11 million from those combined sources. And just as their business structure reflects their dual goal, they picked a name with a double meaning. Jibu is a word that Galen had spotted on a shop sign in Goma, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Galen Welsch 07:19
Jibu means answer or solution in Swahili. And like the English word, in the imperative: 'Answer!' It means to respond. So we felt like it was a nice capture of what we're trying to do to create opportunity for entrepreneurs and at the same time, create a solution for end customers.
Adeline Sire 07:35
So the key elements were in place, except for one crucial piece: a sales strategy that franchisees could get behind. And that created big problems. The partners in the DRC and Rwanda wanted to compete with Coca-Cola, which sold water to hotel customers in disposable bottles. But that did not align with the Welsches’ mission of selling to a less affluent clientele who had greater need for clean drinking water.
Galen Welsch 08:05
When we first launched, we didn't have a proven model we could point to tangibly for partners because we hadn't proven it ourselves.
Adeline Sire 08:13
Jibu ultimately cut ties with the franchisees in Rwanda and the DRC. Now, Uganda presented another roadblock—"regulatory challenges"—a lot of red tape kept them from fully operating. Galen says at that point, they almost abandoned their project.
Galen Welsch 08:31
When we were closest to giving up was after all three of our pilots failed. So as much as our expectation was that maybe one will fail, I think emotionally when it hits you that, well, none of this is working, it was a very difficult turning point.
Adeline Sire 08:48
But they learned from their failures as Randy had predicted, and they quickly rebooted the plan. In just a few months, they raised money, consulted with developing world franchise experts, and they strengthened their franchise legal agreement.
Jonathan Levine 09:05
In 2014, Randy and Galen relaunched their improved franchise model in the capitals of Rwanda and Uganda. They had high aspirations, and for good reason: The bar was set pretty low for providing clean drinking water across most of the continent. Kigali is a good example. It's home to more than a million people, but it doesn't have a central wastewater treatment plant—though one is in the works. For now, about 90 percent of the city uses pit latrines—holes in the ground that can contaminate freshwater supplies. Matt Hangen of Water4 has laid down miles of pipe in sub-Saharan Africa. And he says in many big cities, drainage ditches often become de facto sewers.
Matt Hangen 09:51
And when it rains, those flood and get on the road in your yards and in your homes. The pipes for the water and the sewer systems are all nearby. And if you lose pressure on a pipe, any sewage will actually go into that pipe as the water passes by, into your actual drinking water.
Jonathan Levine 10:11
It's a similar situation in Uganda's capital Kampala, where Antonia Nalunga lives.
Antonia Nalunga 10:16
There is nowhere in the country where the municipal water is safe to drink, you still have to treat it.
Jonathan Levine 10:22
Antonia is the chief franchise development officer for Jibu.
Antonia Nalunga 10:26
Piping is old and rusty, so you still have to treat the water once you get it out of your tap. And that's why the government has had many campaigns over the years. And some other NGOs then came with chlorine tablets to sanitize the water here.
Jonathan Levine 10:42
The chlorine cleans the water...
Antonia Nalunga 10:44
...but it's not pleasant on the tongue. It doesn't agree with people's palates. It smells and tastes terrible.
Jonathan Levine 10:52
So most people have to boil their tap water. Galen Welsch, who's Jibu's CEO, says about 80 percent of their customers used to rely on that method. It's labor intensive and inefficient. And the cost of gas or charcoal for boiling adds up.
Galen Welsch 11:08
And then a lot of times the container the water is put into afterwards, or after it's cooled—an open container—it's actually no longer safe by the time it's consumed. Also, you know, boiling doesn't remove industrial contaminants or any sort of chemical impurities in the water. It only kills bacteriological contamination.
Jonathan Levine 11:29
So to provide clean, uncontaminated water, Randy and Galen asked a water engineer named Marc Malone to customize the filtration system for Jibu. At the time, Marc worked for the nonprofit Healing Waters International, which works on safe water and health education in developing countries. He says the Jibu unit uses two kinds of water purification, reverse osmosis and ultrafiltration.
Marc Malone 11:54
Ultra filtration removes all the physical things that are in the water—viruses, bacteria, dirt. But reverse osmosis will actually remove salts and minerals.
Jonathan Levine 12:03
The machine processes up to 10,000 liters a day and fills 500 20-liter bottles. It's about the size of a typical American kitchen refrigerator. But clean water wasn't enough. Randy and Galen needed contamination-proof packaging too. They dismissed the idea of disposable bottles because of the cost and plastic waste. So they settled on a 20-liter reusable bottle—about five gallons—that could be sterilized and refilled. It looks like a water cooler bottle with a tap at the bottom.
Matt Hangen 12:35
So for Jibu we completely redesigned this system specifically to meet their needs of bottling and filling. Customers bring back their empty bottle. And then we have to sanitize the bottle, fill it and then cap and seal it. So that's all happening within that unit that was very compact, so they could send it to all their franchises. Because we were sometimes air shipping these halfway around the world. So size mattered!
Jonathan Levine 12:59
Depending on the country, Jibu customers pay a one-time fee of $9 to $12 for the reusable 20-liter jug, and then just $1 to refill it—no more than the cost of boiling water.
Randy Welsch 13:11
They buy the bottle once, like a propane gas exchange, and then they exchange the empty for a new bottle that's already been cleaned and filled. And then after that they're just paying for the refill. So it's a refill business
Jonathan Levine 13:26
Refills are much safer than collecting water with old plastic jerrycans—that's still one of the most common methods of transporting water in sub-Saharan Africa. And as Randy says, the water refill model is a lot like the logistics of selling propane gas by exchanging empty canisters for full ones. In fact, some of Jibu's retail points were already selling propane that way. So Jibu added propane refills to its product line and has experimented with a few other high-demand items, like a nutrition-fortified porridge mix. That's important for increasing sales and profits. But Randy isn't keen on piling on new things that don't meet the standard of 'essential.'
Randy Welsch 14:07
We don't want to be a 7-11. We don't have a lot of products. We have a handful of products that we may end up selling that fill gaps.
Adeline Sire 14:18
On this busy street in Kigali, Media Muvuna runs a Jibu franchise. And the water filtration unit is running smoothly. Media is one of the first franchisees to buy into Jibu in 2015 after Galen and Randy rebooted the plan,
Media Muvuna 14:42
We used to think the water was for the rich people. But after seeing Jibu price, I say oh, now everyone can buy water, is possible. That is when I start, for I see even middle-class, poor people can buy water. The other competitors, their price was really double compared to Jibu price. Then I say, oh, based on that price, it was a good opportunity to get a lot of clients, and there's a good opportunity for me, as I could make money on it.
Adeline Sire 15:18
Media has more business training than many other Jibu franchisees. She has an MBA in finance from the University of Rwanda. She says sales in her shop are doing well.
Media Muvuna 15:30
On average, I can say that I'm selling like 4,000 liters per day.
Adeline Sire 15:36
And she has a lot of regular customers.
Media Muvuna 15:38
They like it because of the taste, the price is good, and the water is safe. They trust our water. [To customer: Thank you so much.]
Adeline Sire 15:49
Most households use the water for drinking and making juice and can get by on one or two bottles a week. Emmanuel Minani stopped in to refill his 20-liter bottle. His three children used to suffer regular bouts of diarrhea. So he says he counts on this water to keep them healthy.
Emmanuel Minani 16:08
Before I start to use this water of Jibu, my children have many problems of illness, even their stomach. But because of water of Jibu, no problem.
Adeline Sire 16:25
Safe, good-tasting water is a clear draw for consumers. But the reason Randy and Galen put so much effort into product design was to also make it a good business opportunity for franchisees. Media says she used to run a small print shop in Kigali and could barely make ends meet.
Media Muvuna 16:45
Within printing company, you have to do the job and make invoice. Sometimes you have to wait like three months, waiting. Is taking forever. But with Jibu, the best thing, which everyone likes, the clients pay immediately. So I have cash flow.
Adeline Sire 17:03
She says her income is way up since her days at the print shop.
Media Muvuna 17:07
I'm earning much better. Let's say triple, I can say triple. It has really changed in so many aspects. I changed my children to a better school. And I don't have problem with debts. I can pay my debts.
Adeline Sire 17:24
And that's enhanced opportunities for her family. She could afford to have a third child and help her younger siblings pay for college. Media Muvuna's accomplishment as a franchise owner is more than a personal success story though. It also reflects another aspect of Galen and Randy's mission for Jibu: to create economic opportunities for women to build a better future for themselves and their families. The company actively recruits women like Media to help counter inequities in employment and education.
Randy Welsch 18:02
So almost a half of our franchisees are women. And we have to work harder to recruit women because they're not as proactive as the men are to seek out the opportunity, or don't think they can do it, or they don't have the training or whatever. But most of our best franchisees are women. Some of our franchisees that are successful end up launching another franchise or two. So they're multiple franchise holders. Most of those are women doing that, by the way, which is really cool.
Adeline Sire 18:28
It's especially fitting since women bear the brunt of the work to access clean water. Eleanor Allen is the CEO of Water for People, another NGO working on the continent.
Eleanor Allen 18:41
Women end up walking for water, like in mostly rural areas, but even urban areas that don't have household connections. And so that's a burden of time and physically. And then when people get sick in your family, often from waterborne diseases—parasites, amoebas—the women are the caregivers. So women say, wow, if I don't have to go and spend two hours getting water or boiling my water because it's not safe, I can get a delivery from Jibu, then I can actually have a job and I can spend my time creating an income for my family. So it can lift families out of poverty just by the income-generating potential.
Adeline Sire 19:15
And Jibu isn't just seeking women to be franchise owners. It also actively recruits women for executive positions in the company, like Antonia Nalunga, the chief franchise development officer we heard from earlier. She plays a critical role.
Antonia Nalunga 19:32
My current job is to develop what we call 'the system' in each country to make the brand strong and to make franchises successful.
Adeline Sire 19:44
Antonia was a research manager for a big multinational corporation in South Africa when Galen recruited her. She quit her job and joined Jibu because she says she wanted to make a difference in her home country. She says many businesses in Uganda fail the first year because of a lack of skills and access to capital. So Jibu's investment—in training people, providing equipment and financial support—earned her loyalty.
Antonia Nalunga 20:14
These two gentlemen are coming all the way from the US to provide a solution to my own country, my own people. So think I was challenged on a personal level to come back and be part of the solution.
Jonathan Levine 20:33
Jibu's core customer base is the growing middle class of East Africa's big cities. They're densely populated and underserved by other water providers. So it's the sweet spot for Jibu operators. They need high sales volumes to make any profit since a 20-liter refill only costs $1.
Randy Welsch 20:53
Most people understand emerging markets in terms of a pyramid. And we target the middle of that pyramid, which is the growing middle class—the middle 70 percent. The top 10 percent are rich enough, they can afford to either buy bottled water or have home filtration systems.
Jonathan Levine 21:11
Their strategy has been a hit. Today Jibu runs 150 water filtration franchises and more than 5,500 retail points across seven countries. It has a market-leading position in four of them—Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi. Rwanda is the most successful so far. And it's still building out Tanzania, Zambia, and the DRC. Overall, the business generated $10 million in sales last year and is growing at a rapid clip of 40 percent a year. And while it's profitable in some countries, the overall business is not yet. The Welsches say they're prioritizing reinvestment in growth over short-term profits and expect to be in the black next year. But maybe a more important measure of their social mission is the 350,000 people across the network who drink Jibu's clean water every day. As for the bottom 20 percent of that pyramid, the urban poor...
Randy Welsch 22:08
The bottom 20 percent have trouble affording water at any price. We actually subsidize for that
Jonathan Levine 22:12
It's up to the franchisees to decide how they want to help those who can't pay the market price. Some give away the 20-liter jugs, so those customers only pay for the $1 refill. Others rely on community leaders to identify the neediest and then provide them water at no cost. And then Jibu supports those efforts with small grants or zero-interest loans to the franchise—in part through donations from crowdsourcing services. The company is targeting about 200,000 households for this support over the next year or two. Even more important than subsidizing the poor, Jibu's social mission focuses on creating an opportunity engine—not just a profitable business, but a sustainable generator of income for entire communities. After all, that was Randy's original a-ha revelation—that the social impact of business creation goes much further than philanthropic handouts. And that will become even more important as the population in African cities soars by an additional 950 million people by 2050.
Galen Welsch 23:22
We're looking at how can we generate a livelihood on a continued basis for that community, for the owner, for the folks employed at that franchise.
Jonathan Levine 23:31
To do that, Galen says they set up a system of micro-franchises to groom and test people with no business experience. Think of them as franchisees-in-training.
Galen Welsch 23:42
A micro-franchise buys water at a discount from an existing production franchise and then resells to the neighborhood right around them through a branded point of sale, or with their own delivery vehicle. So the micro-franchise serves two purposes: One, it allows us to distribute deeper into the production franchise neighborhoods, and two, it is our pipeline for new production franchise owners. So based on performance, we then invite micro-franchise owners to apply to have a production franchise.
Jonathan Levine 24:17
That's how Media Muvuna got her start. She began reselling water in 2014 and four months later, graduated to a full-fledged partner. She now runs four franchises in Rwanda and employs 25 people.
Randy Welsch 24:31
Because it's a local ownership model, we're actually empowering locals to control their own destiny far more than if we even just had them as employees, or we were donating to them where they'd have to be dependent on that. Most of our innovation has come from the bottom-up from our franchisees because they're empowered
Jonathan Levine 24:50
Innovations like the reusable 20-liter tap bottle, and door-side water deliveries using three-wheeler tuk-tuks. Tapping the local partners for these kinds of ideas is more than just good business. It's also a key to sustainability. Matt Hangen of Water4 says if you don't inspire collaboration with the communities you're serving, the results can be pretty grim.
Matt Hangen 25:15
The old model within the NGO space was to drill a well, to take a photo and hand it over to a community and leave. The donor got what they want, which was a photo of a well. The communities had that initial celebration. But within 12 months, that waterpoint is going to break because it needed maintenance. At any point 35 percent to 70 percent of water systems in sub-Saharan Africa are non-functional. And I believe that that's because we put the burden of maintenance and fund collection for maintenance on the community.
Adeline Sire 25:52
Another big reason for Jibu's rapid growth is how it reduces barriers for its franchise entrepreneurs. Most companies charge franchisees a hefty upfront fee to help pay back their investment in product development and other expenses. But that's out of reach for most Africans. So Jibu inverts the typical franchise model and fronts the expenses.
Randy Welsch 26:16
So the largest store costs about $20,000. There's no way they have that type of money. So how we've innovated the franchise models is we pay 95 percent of that cost, they pay $2,000, maybe $3,000 in some places for a license fee, we build out that store fully. That innovation alone is significant in emerging markets. That's what's enabled us to work.
Adeline Sire 26:39
For that model to work, Galen realized they needed a mechanism for franchisees to repay the upfront costs. So they borrowed a simple scheme used by utility companies, charging clients on metered usage. Once the shops are up and running, the franchisees repay Jibu's investments with a flat fee per liter—just a fraction of a cent. And then Galen says successful franchises can earn a healthy net profit of 15 percent to 25 percent. That's after fixed costs are covered and sales really fire up. Despite Jibu's steady growth, Randy says they've faced a steep learning curve operating in emerging markets.
Randy Welsch 27:28
Yeah, we've had so many challenges, the challenges that come with the territory, which are wars, political instability, diseases, a lack of rule of law in many places, chaos. Things are pretty chaotic.
Adeline Sire 27:43
He says government officials have generally welcomed Jibu because the company and its franchisees invest in communities where they operate and create jobs. They also pay the cities for the water supplies. But individual regulators are another story. Randy says a few have tried to pressure franchise owners to pay kickbacks.
Randy Welsch 28:05
There's just all sorts of crazy things they may say, but we don't pay bribes.
Adeline Sire 28:09
He recalls one especially tough incident.
Randy Welsch 28:12
We had a regulator who had been coming to this particular franchisee for quite a while asking for bribes. The franchisee is trained to not pay bribes, says no, gets the approvals. The next time this regulator comes in, does an inspection and says you don't pass, and he then reports it up his chain and has TV cameras come to the franchisee—and then reports that that franchisee was filtering toilet water. So now this is on the news. This is the challenge with the franchise. If one franchise sees something like that happen to them, it affects the whole brand. People think, well, they're doing it here, they're doing it in other places.
Adeline Sire 28:56
He says Jibu's media team worked months of overtime to control the damage before customers were assured the water was clean and safe. Jibu's success has also presented challenges. It's inspired copycats, especially in Rwanda.
Randy Welsch 29:16
Counterfeit water. Yeah, it's been a challenge there. And they even use our logo, our colors, the same thing...
Galen Welsch 29:23
So I mean, at this point, we have Ebu, we have Jeeb, we have Jicar, Jibar. Some folks obviously just take Jibu directly...
Randy Welsch 29:30
...and then sell bad water in our bottles. We've actually had to go to court and have it be enforced there.
Adeline Sire 29:36
All those challenges—the copycats, the bribes, the chaos as Randy puts it—are all good reasons Jibu entrusts franchise operators with making local decisions: They can deal with them far more effectively than central management. About 30 percent of Jibu operations are standard across countries. But Galen says the remainder—a hefty 70b percent—is left to folks on the ground. And that's the key to growing the business across countries.
Galen Welsch 30:08
They're localizing Jibu to that new context in a way that we couldn't. So if we were to go to South Sudan, we would be so inefficient at creating a solution, because we would have no relationships, we wouldn't know how the regulations work, we wouldn't know what local consumers want—all of that. But if we find a local partner who's already a seasoned business person in that environment, and they can capture the vision and understand the basics of the Jibu model, and then adapt it to that local environment, it's so much faster, and actually costs them so much less than it would cost us to do that same thing. So that's how we're looking at scale, is how can we localize not just each independent franchise unit, but how can we decentralize the ownership of the mothership itself, so to speak. And that's working.
Adeline Sire 30:54
It's working. But Randy says it's an ongoing challenge to find people whose skills and goals align with Jibu's mission.
Randy Welsch 31:03
The biggest challenge we found was, can we find people that both want to make money and make a difference? We could find people, many people that had strong strengths in one of those things, but usually not both. So you'll find people that really want to help their communities, but they don't have enough business sense to really run a business and make it sustainable. Then you have business people that see the opportunity, but they really aren't doing it because they care about the community.
Adeline Sire 31:31
The COVID-19 crisis is a prime example of why recruiting the right people—those with business skill and community mindedness—is so critical. When the virus first hit East Africa in March 2020, Randy says it was the ultimate stress test for Jibu. A corporate leadership team quickly established a list of safety recommendations for the franchisees to implement. But the local operators beat the company to the punch.
Randy Welsch 32:01
By the time we got that list down, three or four days, most of our franchisees had already implemented everything on that list. So it was things like free delivery to customers, free water to hospitals and schools. They were sacrificing their own profit and money to do the right thing because of their ownership and their care. And it comes back to the type of people we choose have to be both about making money and making a difference. We actually grew our business through COVID! It's that bottoms-up approach that really is the difference in Jibu.
Adeline Sire 32:37
As Randy and Galen see it, empowering local operators to control their own destinies may be the single most important factor in creating a lasting social impact. Of Jibu's 2,600 employees, only four are Westerners. Which raises a delicate point about the power dynamics of outsiders like the Welsches promoting solutions to local problems. I asked Galen if he and his father are ever perceived as playing the white savior role in sub-Saharan Africa.
Galen Welsch 33:10
It's definitely awkward, and there's definitely incredible advantages I have just from my skin color. But how I see my role in what I'm doing is as a liaison between cultures and between countries. And if there's an equal power dynamic and relationship between parties, that's where the true innovation can come from. That's where we can actually change the world.
Jonathan Levine 33:37
Randy Welsch recently retired from the company, but he's still active as a board director. He envisions a time when Jibu might expand to other regions of the world. Parties from some 50 countries have already inquired about buying franchises. And the company may continue broadening its products and services to other essential items, even healthcare. For now, he's still pinching himself about Jibu's evolution from near failure to raging success.
Randy Welsch 34:05
This is far beyond what I realistically would have ever expected happening. And I think we've just hit the right idea at the right time. The traction we've gained and the favor we've gained —it's mind-blowing, actually.
Jonathan Levine 34:23
Thank you for joining us today on our journey with Jibu. If you enjoyed this story, check out our earlier episodes, tell your friends, and please, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. In our next episode: Most of us take our morning cup of coffee for granted. But climate change is wreaking havoc on struggling coffee growers. And something radical has to happen to keep them in business.
Rob Terenzi 34:47
A lot of people are leaving coffee farming for cities or migrating. And I don't think that the industry has totally understood yet just how in jeopardy the world's supply of great coffee actually is.
Jonathan Levine 35:02
Slashing the supply chain to help coffee farmers survive. That's next time on Uncharted Ground. This episode was reported and written by Adeline Sire and produced by me. Our story was edited by Jennifer Goren. Our sound editing and design was by Tina Tobey. And we got sound help in Kigali from Clement Uwiringiyimana. And of course, our thanks to Galen and Randy Welsch and all their team Jibu. Uncharted Ground is produced and distributed in partnership with the Stanford Social Innovation Review at Stanford University, and online at ssir.org. I'm Jonathan Levine, and you've been on Uncharted Ground.