The challenge
Increasing access to clean drinking water and making it more sustainable. At the same time, developing the entrepreneurial and collaboration capacity of MegaGroup’s European Management Team.
As a commercial water-solutions company, MegaGroup has the ambition to contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals of access to water. Sounds logical if you’re already a leader in selling products that can contribute to this. But how do you do that in a way that goes beyond profit goals and creates impact where it’s needed? Where do you start?
Our approach
We took MegaGroup’s European Management Team on an immersive journey in Kenya to connect and collaborate directly with experts from healthcare NGO Amref Health Africa. The process was an intense pressure cooker week in which MegaGroup and Amref immersed themselves in what access to water is all about in practice. Alternated with leadership workshops and guided team sessions in which both teams learned to get the best out of themselves and each other.
During site-visits, they saw for themselves what it means to not have access to water. In conversation with local communities and local experts, they learned what is truly needed on the ground. For example, they learned that digging water wells makes no sense if ownership is not local.
The experience stayed with them on a personal level, steering the motivation to act and leading to a long-term partnership between MegaGroup and Amref Kenya in the form of the enterprise WaterStarters. Water points as social enterprises, where local communities themselves invest a percentage and become owners, even turning an income.
The result
A groundbreaking social entrepreneurial model in which communities take ownership of their own water points by investing in a percentage. The success of this initiative has impact in several different areas: more effectiveness of health prevention programs, improved food security through better harvests, empowerment and increased income of local communities, knowledge transfer between organizations, and more.
As a result of the program and the continued collaboration between two very different organizations, MegaGroup has become more social in how it does business and Amref has become more enterprising in doing good. At the same time, both teams have made enormous leaps in their own leadership and team development. So that’s possible, all three at the same time. Win, win win.
Bernard Verburg
MegaGroup
When I came in at MegaGroup, I found a company with a very good position in the market but there was no soul. So then I looked at where this world is going and the role of water in the world. And you see it’s incredibly scarce. So we said: that’s what it’s all about! This is about making a change by making the lives of people better by making sure they have access to our water solutions. Better Futute is guiding us, MegaGroup, Amref and WaterStarters in this adventure.
What is the bigger impact?
Developing new business models with an impact purpose.
Possibility of scalability.
Supporting local communities to become empowered and self-reliant.
Life-changing for people and organizations: an NGO and a commercial company bring out the best in each other and learn from what the other can do.
