aQysta – Barsha Pump:No-fuel Water Pump

I co-founded aQysta in 2013 with the aim to provide sustainable access to water for people suffering from economic water scarcity. I was born in a small river-valley in Nepal, where my parents had a farm situated right next to a river. However, it was not possible to use the water from the river for irrigation due to the high costs of pumping water to higher croplands. Farmers were restricted to depend only on rainfall.

When I became an engineer, I was triggered to find a solution to this problem, which we managed to do at aQysta: we developed the Barsha Pump, a water pump powered solely by water without requiring any fuel or electricity, resulting in zero operating costs. I lead an international team of business developers who have managed to implement Barsha pump in 21 countries. I have been listed as the Forbes 30 under 30 social entrepreneurs.

To feed the growing world population, agricultural productivity has to increase and become resilient towards less regular rainfall patterns caused by climate change. Irrigation is the way to go, but the costs of pumping water are prohibitively costly for smallholder farmers, with more than 1.6 billion people suffering from economic water scarcity globally.

aQysta’s water-powered pumps provide the most cost-effective pumping technique as no fuel or electricity is required to operate and only minimal maintenance is required. With the implementation of pumps under the pay-after-harvest model devised by aQysta, that matches farmers’ wallets and cash flow cycles, the technology is affordable to all farmers, including small holders.

Access to reliable irrigation increases farmers production and income 2-5 times, creates jobs and enhances food security, as it allows farmers to produce crops year-round and enables to grow a wider range of crops, with both a higher market and nutritional values.

Food security is one of the most crucial global issues with almost one billion people - or one in nine - going to bed hungry every day. The UN estimates that by 2050 another 2 billion people will be suffering from food insecurity and food production needs to increase sharply to feed the growing world population, while agricultural lands are predicted to decrease due to growing urbanization across the world and should not expand to prevent deforestation. In other words, the productivity on given agricultural land needs to increase significantly, while making the food production resilient towards extreme weather events, caused by climate change.

Access to reliable Irrigation is one of the most effective ways to create this resilience and to boost smallholders’ income and agricultural productivity. However, about 1.6 billion people in the world live in areas of economic water scarcity, caused by lack of infrastructure or affordable technologies to get access to water, despite having physical water resources available. Agriculture, inherently, is one of the most affected sectors with economic water scarcity, forcing farmers to depend on rainfall for agriculture purposes, causing reduction in agriculture yield and productivity.

aQysta has developed and brought to market a patented hydro-powered irrigation pump branded as the “Barsha Pump” (‘Barsha’ means rain in Hindi/Nepalese). It is driven solely by the water flow of streams, rivers or canals, thus providing access to irrigation without the need of any fuel or electricity. Hydropower is the most cost-efficient power source for pumping and by harnessing it, the Barsha Pump is capable to provide water 24 hours per day, while featuring high efficiencies.

The Barsha Pump can lift water directly from a flowing water source as it is propelled by a waterwheel, which also makes it suitable for use in a wide range of rivers and canals, without the need for infrastructure (dams etc.) It operates purely mechanically, with a minimum number of moving parts and without transmission, as it creates pressure only through the interaction of water and air columns, based on a proven scientific principle. All these aspects make it a simple and robust solution, with virtually no maintenance requirement.

aQysta also developed the innovative EASI-Pay model (Enhancing Access to Sustainable Irrigation with pay-after-harvest model) to make the technology affordable to small holder farmers by matching payments to their cash-flow cycle.

The project serves smallholder farmers who currently do not have access to irrigation, or are paying high fees for it, despite having potential sources of flowing water nearby. This group consists of farmers who are:

- Willing to make the transition from subsistence to commercial farming, or
- Looking to scale up their commercial farming operations.

Due to a lack of irrigation, farmers are limited to one-season rain-fed subsistence farming or commercial farming on a small scale, making them vulnerable to food security and constrains them from making a transition towards socio-economic prosperity. The Barsha Pump provides access to year-round irrigation at the lowest possible costs and serves as a tool to increase agriculture yield and income of farmers 2 to 5 times, making farming profitable.

aQysta has local presence in Nepal, India, Malawi, Colombia and Indonesia for close engagement with beneficiaries of the pumps. We provide services to farmers such as site feasibility evaluation for suitability of a Barsha Pump and the installation. We also follow-up with users of the Pumps, providing after-service and systematically gathering feedback to improve our products. The financing scheme was developed because of the farmers feedback that they are not able to pay upfront.

The Barsha Pump is specifically designed to benefit smallholder farmers, who often find themselves tangled in a vicious cycle of poverty, without financial means for an irrigation pump, limiting them to one-season rainfed production and low market prizes of restricted seasonal crop types.

The Barsha Pump eliminates all operating costs of pumping for irrigation and is facilitated with a pay-after-harvest financing model, allowing all farmers to adopt one without upfront investment requirements. With this, farmers can break through the vicious cycle of poverty with increased, risk-free and year-round production and a wider choice of crops with higher market value.

I was born in Lele, a small river-valley in the hilly region of Nepal, about 20 km from Kathmandu. Most smallholder farmers here simply depend on rainfall, despite the presence of many rivers in the area, as pumps that are required to lift water from river to croplands are prohibitively costly and time-intensive to acquire, operate and maintain. I have witnessed this challenge closely as I saw my parents carry heavy buckets of water from the river up to their higher situated fields, where crops cannot grow without irrigation.

While growing up and studying to become an engineer I started to think about a solution for this need for cost-effective irrigation in my home country Nepal. During a master studies program at Delft University of Technology, I met fellow students Fred and Lennart. In parallel to our studies, we started aQysta as a student project and the early successes and the potential we saw inspired us to start up in 2013.

I grew up in a village in Nepal and farming was very important to our family both for sustenance and livelihood. And water was the most important factor in farming. Especially in the paddy growing season, my parents would go overnight to literally catch the first rains to irrigate to make sure we would be able to grow paddy on time and secure food for the year. An irony to the situation is that our farm was situated just above a river that was flowing all year round.

As I grew up to be an engineer, it just triggered me as to why was there no easy and affordable way to get this river water to go up – why not use the energy in the river itself? This thought led to the development of the Barsha pump which has been able to provide water not only to my parent’s farm but thousands of farmers worldwide today.

Working on Barsha pump technology gives me an opportunity to use my skills to develop a solution to the problem that I have personally lived with and can be helpful to so many others in a similar situation.

I am an Industrial Engineer holding an MSc. with honours from Delft University of Technology in Management of Technology, specialized in Economics and Finance with an additional annotation in Entrepreneurship. I started my professional career at Bosch Limited in India and have taught Entrepreneurship at Kathmandu University in Nepal.

Growing up in the context of the problem we are tackling, gives me first-hand knowledge about the needs of the target customers of our products.

I initiated the idea of the Barsha pump, and have secured resources and team-members to grow aQysta to this stage. I have built a strong network among government and private organizations, led several international development projects and am spearheading the business development activities of aQysta and implementation globally. In 2017, I was listed on Forbes’ 30 under 30 list as one of the most promising young entrepreneurs.

Starting as graduates, me and the other co-founders have together brought aQysta to its current size of 30 FTE, with team-members working from offices in The Netherlands, Nepal, India, Malawi, Colombia and Indonesia. We have bootstrapped resources, exceeded expectations and milestones and have been able to build this great team which comprises of a unique mix of excellent designers and engineers, together with international business developers with knowledge about the local irrigation context and user scenarios from different parts of the world which is one of the biggest reasons for aQysta’s success thus far and leading to future growth.

Nepal is an important country for aQysta. We started the idea of Barsha pump from Nepal and it is also the country with the most Barsha pump installations. However, the road to reach here has not been easy. We had the first field pilot of Barsha Pumps in Nepal in early 2015. We planned with further pilots of the Barsha Pump, but the 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit Nepal in April 2015, severely affecting our plans. As Nepal recovered from the shocks of quake, we formed partnership with different organizations to include Barsha Pumps as part of the earthquake recovery plans. To make matter worse, India imposed a border blockade closing all supplies into land-locked Nepal for six months. Our first container of Barsha Pumps were stuck in the border for 4 months. By the time the pumps arrived, we had 1 month to install all the pumps and meet project milestones. We assembled and installed all 20 pumps in 2 weeks mobilizing all possible internal and partner resources. Looking at the results of the pilot, Nepal government included 200 Barsha pumps in their next fiscal year’s plan to provide livelihood options to earthquake victims. 

When I was initially starting to work on the idea of the Barsha pump in Nepal, I got admitted to my masters program in the Netherlands with partial scholarship. When I came to the Netherlands to do my Masters, it would have been an easier choice for me to follow a normal route of finding a part-time job to secure funds to complete my education. Instead I chose to continue with the idea of the Barsha Pump and reached out to interested people to join me and found my co-founders. In less than a year of being in the Netherlands, we had won the most prestigious student innovation competition in the Netherlands - Philips Innovation Award. From having no prior knowledge about doing business to establishing aQysta, gathering a team, securing financial resources and forming required partnerships to bring the Barsha Pump technology to a stage where it is successfully deployed globally showcases my ability to lead a team to drive the innovation process. In this time I had the privilege to showcase the Barsha Pump as an example of successful innovation to the King of the Netherlands and the Prime-minister of Nepal. 

aQysta focuses on the research, development and commercialization of innovative hydropowered irrigation pumps, which convert the energy in flowing water of rivers or canals to pressurize water for irrigation to directly deliver it to agriculture plots. Since our products do not consume any fuel or electricity and require very little maintenance, they operate virtually without operating expenses and do not emit any polluting greenhouse gases. Instead they mechanically convert the flow of rivers or canals into a pumping action, which minimizes losses of energy conversion.

The waterwheel of the Barsha Pump incorporates a patented, integrated spiraling channel which performs the pumping function. This innovation leads to an unprecedented architecture that allows to increase the efficiency of the pumping principle by 50% and for a lighter (therefore portable) product, which is mass producible in a cost-efficient manner, at a standardized quality.

Where flowing water is present, the Barsha Pump present the most cost-efficient alternative to any other pumping technology, saving up to 70% of irrigation costs compared to conventional, fuel-based pumps and requiring half the initial investment of a solar pump. The Barsha Pump also requires least and most simple maintenance as it works purely mechanically and has only one moving part, which is available locally.

What makes aQysta stand out of the crowd is the integration of innovative hardware with the innovative ‘pay-after-harvest’ business model, enabling small farmers to pay based on their cash inflow from harvest, allowing for long-lasting socio-economic and environmental impact while having a solid business case.

Our theory of change at aQysta is that with providing access to irrigation as critical element, the opportunities of smallholder farmers who are traditionally left behind and often find themselves tangled in a vicious cycle of poverty, can be elevated as it allows them to sustainably increase production significantly.

Most smallholders around the globe simply depend on rainfall, as conventional forms of irrigation such as diesel pumps are prohibitively costly and time-intensive to acquire, operate and maintain, especially in the context of remote rural areas, where costs for transport are high.

Rainfed farming limits the harvest as productivity is not optimized and limited to only one season per year. This also subjects farmers to low market prizes of the crops due to an oversupply of the seasonal crops they can grow. On top of this, due to climate change rainfall patterns are becoming increasingly less regular, worsening the conditions of rainfed farming. In summary, rainfed farming results in diminished agricultural productivity, incomes and livelihoods.

Access to reliable irrigation is one of the most effective ways to create resilience against the more irregular weather patterns and to boost smallholders’ income and agricultural productivity by 2 to 5 times, compared to rain-fed agriculture (FAO). With irrigation, farmers can farm year-round and increase productivity, with a free choice of crop type. Farmers can grow crops with a higher market value and sell their products during the dry season when prices are higher.

A Barsha Pump in combination with the pay-after-harvest financing model can provide the access to irrigation for smallholder farmers as it is affordable, without any upfront investment requirement.

Since lack of irrigation facilities is cited as the most crucial inhibiting factor for farmers in switching from subsistence farming to commercial farming, we believe that the Barsha Pump provides the opportunity for small- and mid-scale farmers to become an entrepreneur by shifting to commercial farming. In the majority of the cases farming is done by women.

Pumping with a Barsha Pump prevents 500 kg of CO2 emissions per ha-year, provides 20 persons with increased food security and employment for 5 persons/ha.

Currently, aQysta’s Barsha Pumps are irrigating over 300 HA, have pumped 500 Million litres of water, served 7,000 smallholder farmers and have avoided 300T of CO2.

We expect that the Barsha Pump will serve as a tool to hundreds of thousands of smallholder farmers, enabling them to transition from subsistence to commercial farming, substantially increasing their income and climbing up the ladder of economic prosperity.

We expect to scale the implementation of pumps significantly after standardizing and optimizing the pay-after-harvest financing model this year. We estimate that in one year, we will serve a total of more than 25,000 people with increased income and food security, by installing 900 additional pumps. In 5 years, we expect to install 6,500 Barsha Pumps, serving 460,000 farmers with improved food security and creating 130,000 jobs.

In addition to the Barsha Pump, aQysta is extending its portfolio with new products to allowing to serve a wider range of application scenarios. The HyPump, a 30 times larger capacity variant of the Barsha Pump, was added to our portfolio last year and we are developing the ITP (Integrated Turbine Pump) which optimizes power in small waterfalls. These pumps are expected to serve farmers around the globe to secure food production with affordable, pressurized water-saving irrigation without any GHG emissions. By 2025 aQysta expects to irrigate 27,000 hectares with all its pumps, providing food security to 1 million people, and create more than 508,000 jobs. In the process, 25,426 tonnes of CO2 will be mitigated.

aQysta aims to become a global market leader in renewable energy pumps and thereby elevate hundreds of thousands small holder farmers around the globe by providing access to affordable sustainable irrigation, resulting in opportunities for farmers to increase income and food security.

To achieve this goal, within the next year aQysta is planning to have standardized EASI-PAY to a commercially viable as well as scalable business model to be able to scale the implementations of Barsha Pumps. The EASI-Pay model enables anyone to be able to purchase a pump. We believe this will unlock the large market of smallholder farmers, who do not have resources to invest in a pump upfront.

Furthermore, we are working on building a global distribution and sales network, through which aQysta is extending to other geographies. aQysta is optimizing its business model in selected focus countries, to provide distributors a road map to approach the market in other parts of the country or different countries. aQysta has identified a public, commercial and hybrid avenue that exist to further scale the Barsha Pump, depending on the geography of implementation: some more private markets and others featuring a private-public mix.

To achieve a greater depth in the market from a technological perspective, aQysta is in the process of diversifying its portfolio to other hydropowered pumps that can serve greater heights or whole irrigation system layouts, and will allow aQysta to serve more farmers as a decentralized water service provider over the longer term.

The barriers to scale the implementation of Barsha Pumps with the EASI-Pay model globally are as follows:

Accessibility: Making the product and financing model accessible to rural areas through last-mile supply chain in developing markets is a barrier.

Awareness: Hydro-powered pumps are not yet known at policy levels as well as farmers' level. Awareness among smallholder farmers about the benefits of hydro-powered pumps, over conventional or other renewable energy pumping solution is lacking. Therefore, hydro powered pumps are often not considered by potential clients. Also, they do not appear at policy level discussions yet and are therefore not included in existing subsidy schemes, which leads to an unequal playing field compared to competitive solutions. The solar pumping industry, is more developed with larger companies that actively lobby for their solutions and reap the benefits of government subsidies.

Upfront investment: The upfront investment for the Barsha Pump is a hurdle for many smallholder farmers, as their cash flow does not allow them to invest and they tend to prefer solutions with a low capex (e.g. diesel pumps), even though they are more expensive throughout their lifecycle.

Funding: Expanding the EASI-Pay financing model across countries requires working capital. In addition, building awareness, accessibility and variants of the technology requires growth capital.

Find the right customer in a scalable manner: In order to scale the implementation of the Barsha Pump, or any hydropowered pump, suitable rivers with adjacent farming land need to be detected in a scalable manner.

Accessibility & Awareness: aQysta plans to overcome these barrier in two ways: First, the company is creating consolidated partnerships with distributors, retailers and sales agents, that have strong local presence at grassroot level. With respect to the awareness among customers, these parties can introduce the Barsha Pump across different geographic regions. Besides, aQysta will leverage its network of high-level organizations such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands, The German Ministry of Environment, the Business Call to Action network of the United Nations, the United Nations Development Program, the Siemens Stiftung (Foundation) and others.

Upfront investment: By combining the Barsha Pump with financing schemes that match the cash flow of farmers, the project aims to overcome this challenge.

Funding: aQysta has bootstrapped its way to the current stage and is now ready to scale. We are threfore in the process of raising our first private equity round of €1M to fuel our further growth.

Find the right customer in a scalable manner: aQysta has developed a proprietary GIS tool that produces heat maps to indicate the potential of the Barsha Pump. These maps will be used by the delivery network in order to target geographic clusters where a lot of potential for the Barsha Pump is present.

aQysta has been building a network of partners that help in the marketing, developing, funding and eliciting of product demand in different geographies. Different type of partnerships are:

- Distribution and retail partners: aQysta is forming partnerships to leverage upon existing sales and distribution networks. aQysta has formed partnerships in around 20 countries for the sales of its products.

- Manufacturing partners: aQysta relies on a network of manufacturing partners that produce the components for the pumps and send them to aQysta’s warehouse where they are consolidated and shipped

- Irrigation officers: agricultural chiefs and district councils to find farmers who can benefit from aQysta’s pumps.

- NGO partners: NGO’s that we partner with help to create awareness about our pumps and can implement them in their projects. They also provide training for farmers to optimize the harvest.

As of now, aQysta has created traction among large organizations such as Jains Irrigation (billion dollar company), the FAO (Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN), as well as several ministries in Nepal, Colombia and Spain.

Currently, aQysta sells the Barsha Pumps to commercial farmers, government and development organizations at a margin directly or through retailers, who buy the pump against upfront payment. However, many smallholder farmers cannot afford to pay for a pump upfront. To also enable smallholder farmers to purchase the Barsha Pump, aQysta has been developing an innovative pay-after-harvest model, in which aQysta sells the Barsha Pump to trading organizations, which support farmers with market access and discounts its payments to the farmer by 10-20%, in order to recover the pump (and pay aQysta) in a way that matches the farmers’ wallet and cash flow cycle. In that way, aQysta aims to unlock the huge market of smallholder farmers, by making the pumps affordable to small holder farmers based on the revenues earned from farming over time and not having to be reliant on subsidies to get the pump. aQysta believes in private market mechanisms and that direct payments from farmers is a more sustainable approach than providing the technology through subsidies or donations, which is why aQysta is working on the pay-after-harvest financing mechanism that matches the farmers cash inflow from harvest.

aQysta aims to be a global leader in the development and deployment of hydro-powered pumps and aims to scale its growth beyond funding through the sales of its products. Following this ambition, aQysta has proven the concept and established the paradigm of hydro-powered pumps as a commercial product with more than 300 Barsha Pumps sold across 19 countries globally, accumulating a revenue of around $400,000 over the past three years. However, in doing so, the company has only scratched the surface of the market, which is estimated to have total potential of around 22 million end users. The company intends to standardize its scaling model with funding and raise private capital in the future to sell its products through a network of sales partners.

The challenge is that those farmers/communities that could benefit most from the Barsha Pump do not have the financial means to pay upfront. The long-term aim of this project is for aQysta to more efficiently serve smallholder farmers, while also getting on a trajectory towards financial sustainability.

Up until now, we have had to bootstrap aQysta to its current state, because it is still regarded as too risky for commercial investors or development banks. In order to attract commercial funding beyond the term of this project it is key to proof the business potential of the farm incubator and to thereby spark a faster commercial growth trajectory with increased social impact.

So far, aQysta has generated around USD 2 million in revenues from sales of Barsha Pumps and implementation projects related to the Barsha Pump. Furthermore, our company has raised around $ 1 million in grant funding for the development of the Barsha Pump and around $ 2 million for the development of future products.

So far, aQysta has mainly undergone product development and iteration and has made some initial revenue. That development has therefore been funded by bootstrapping and through public funds. The founding team is now looking to make the transition to scale and in the process of preparing its first private investment round, which we are looking to close by the end of the year.

The funding will be used to scale the EASI-Pay Financing model developed by aQysta and to commercialize the second and third product generation of aQysta.

To scale, the EASI-Pay mechanism needs to be standardized and automated with control systems to remotely monitor and control water-flow to guarantee payment from farmers. Furthermore, partnerships for market access and financing will be formalized.

Our annual budget lies around USD 1.5 million

The main challenges are to bring our innovation to the small holder farmers, who cannot afford the upfront costs of the pumps and the lack of awareness of both farmers and policy makers about the technology.

I think I could greatly benefit from the professional management and development services, mentorship and coaching, educational training and capacity building provided by the Elevate Prize to further develop our pay-after-harvest EASI-PAY business model to a standardized model ready to be scaled, to tackle the barrier of the upfront costs.

The connection with influencers, industry leaders, and experts through Elevate Prize Foundation’s two-year program, media and marketing, would be a great boost to overcome the barrier of the lacking awareness about the benefits of hydropowered irrigation pumping technology. Furthermore, we aim to get visibility through the Elevate Prize, and thereby secure contact with more trading organizations for the EASY-PAY scheme

The funding of the prize would provide us working capital required to expand the financing model across countries and growth capital to overcome the barrier of lacking awareness and accessibility of the technology. We will expand our marketing to show small holder farmers the clear benefits (less water usage, dry season farming, avoid conflict of water rights) of innovative farming with a Barsha Pump.

As Solve has been working with several innovative start-ups we can imagine that the above barriers have been mentioned before. Therefor we would be grateful if Solve can bring us in contact with other applicants who have overcome similar barriers.

aQysta believes in sharing knowledge to improve quality of products and services. To reach as much as possible local farmers, we have to work together with other companies, government and NGO’s. Our partnership goals are explained as follows:

Marketing, Media and exposure:

By working together with NGO’s and governmental institutions we hope to create more awareness for our pumps, while we give more knowledge back to our partners due training of farmers in cost and emission reduced irrigation methods.

Funding and revenue model:

EASI-Pay was tested on a small scale. To develop it further bring it to a larger scale, we would like to learn from past experiences of other previous applicants who have introduced innovative financing methods for their hardware innovations.

To rapidly scale the revenue model, it requires a partnership between aQysta, smallholder, farmers grouped as Farmer Producer Organizations (FPOs) and (inter)national corporate buyers of the agricultural produce.

- Corporate agricultural buyers required to rapidly scale our revenue model. We are very interested in becoming connected with corporations who are sourcing crops (especially cacao, fruits and vegetables) from farmers, such as Olam International, Kroger and Yum! Brands.

- Development banks such as the Inter-American Development Bank who provide development financing and support to impact projects like ours, which regular banks would consider to risky. Also, the Ep-Fet-Po program from The World Bank Group has several similarities with our proposed business model. aQysta believes that the start of a commercial farm for small holder farmers should go without investments against high interest rates. We are interested to partner with The World Bank Group to gain more experience and advise on how to optimize and standardize our business model.

- Private/Public funders for adequate financial resources to grow the organization further. Related to this, SOCAP would present a great opportunity to present to potential investors for scaling.

- The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation focuses on; ‘Establish financial services for the world’s poorest to use to build more prosperous and secure lives for themselves, their families, and their communities’. Our project matches perfectly with the often-used statement; By giving people the tools to lead productive lives, we can help them out of poverty. A partnership with the foundation would provide aQysta the experience and network to scale the EASI-PAY model in order to reach more small holder farmers.