EarthEnable, Inc

We are applying for the Elevate Prize because millions of people live on dirt floors that make them sick, and we have a proven intervention that will fundamentally transform rural housing. We up-skill underemployed masons and youth in rural areas of Uganda and Rwanda to become flooring entrepreneurs who independently sell and build our proprietary and ultra-affordable earthen floor within their own communities. But our mission is to eradicate unhealthy living conditions for all 1.4 billion people who live on dirt floors. In order to successfully reach this scale, EarthEnable would utilize Elevate funding to 1) to systematize our process of training and certifying franchisees to ensure replicability, 2) to begin expanding to geographies beyond our two current countries of operation, and 3) to develop additional products for franchisees to serve all of their communities’ housing needs. Through these actions, we will perfect our methods of profitably connecting rural customers to our affordable housing via a replicable business model and, in so doing, pave the way for replicators to franchise the business or license the technology to expand earthen construction solutions to customers across the globe.  

My name is Gayatri Datar and I co-founded EarthEnable in 2014. I was part of a group of Stanford students who visited Rwanda and recognized that the dirt floors in rural homes threaten family health. We learned that concrete floors were the only option available in these areas of developing countries, but that families were unable to afford them. When researching alternatives, we found earthen floors, a niche flooring in the U.S. Most materials comprising these could be found in villages, but the sealant to bind them was prohibitively expensive. We engineered an eco-friendly, affordable floor sealant: EarthEnable’s proprietary flaxseed-based varnish that is now used by several hundred masons to install earthen floors for thousands of families in Rwanda and Uganda. We are developing a diverse array of earthen housing products by combining the innovative earthen construction methods employed in villages with our rigorous R&D testing and design. We have further unleashed the potential of communities by training local masons to become micro-franchisees who sell and build our products. Our vision is to catalyze an industry for affordable housing improvement that can meet global demand by building a sustainable business model that can be replicated at mass scale.

Approximately 1.4 billion people worldwide, including 70% of Rwandans and Ugandans, live on dirt floors, which have been shown to be a major cause of diarrhea, parasitic infections, respiratory diseases, malnutrition, and anemia. Replacing a dirt floor with a clean one has been shown to reduce diarrheal disease by 49% and parasitic infections by 78%. The only available alternative, concrete is too expensive for these 1.4 billion people and creates tremendous carbon emissions. Cement production is responsible for 8% of total global carbon emissions and is incredibly energy and water-intensive to produce. Since its inception in 2014, EarthEnable has delivered earthen housing products to provide clean and healthy homes to almost 40,000 individuals across Rwanda and Uganda. We empower and certify unemployed and underemployed local masons to become earthen construction entrepreneurs. Through comprehensive training and support, we equip these ‘micro-franchisees’ to identify and recruit customers in their own communities, source materials from customers’ back yards, and build our affordable and green housing products. Simultaneously, we are innovating new earthen housing products to meet all affordable housing needs while working with the Rwandan government to develop policy standards to legalize and regulate earthen construction. 

Our vision is to build an affordable housing industry serving the rural poor. Historically, the poverty of rural consumers, the difficulty of transporting construction materials on rural roads, and the lack of training available to local construction workers impeded the development of affordable housing solutions. EarthEnable has uniquely developed methods for profitably building housing products using materials from customers’ back yards and providing training and supervision to local masons to ensure they deliver these products at consistent quality standards. Under our model, impoverished customers can afford our products, micro-franchisees can profit from each installation while serving their own community, and EarthEnable can cover its minimal overhead with sales of varnish to micro-franchisees. By demonstrating that micro-franchisees can profitably build earthen products using local materials, we incentivize replicators and position ourselves to build an affordable housing industry. Our profitability will spur replicators who could license our technology and expand our businesses to new countries. We will give these entrants the toolkit and methods we’ve created to build a thriving rural housing industry. We see EarthEnable as an industry builder, with the goal of removing the barriers to entry for future organizations and companies to scale our impact. 

The customers we serve understand that dirt floors are detrimental to their health and livelihood and the masons we employ are hardworking, skilled laborers in need of employment. EarthEnable is leveraging this demand for earthen floors, the capacity of local laborers, and the materials available within rural communities to develop an earthen construction industry. Our clients report that when they purchase our floor, they enjoy improved household health, decreased healthcare expenditures, spend less time cleaning the house and washing clothes--tasks that can take hours a day for families with a dirt floor- and appreciate the beauty of their homes. By providing an affordable, sustainable floor, we are giving rural families access to the beautiful, healthy homes they desire. By training local masons to sell and install our floors, we are giving them the chance to improve their community and increase their economic opportunities. Finally, by proving ours to be a profitable business model and developing policy standards to legalize earthen construction, we are catalyzing an industry for affordable housing improvement that will serve the 1.4 billion still living on dirt floors.

Since its inception, EarthEnable has served over 45,000 people. The number of people we serve includes every person whose health is positively impacted by living in improved housing, as well as those who gain meaningful employment from installing our products. One year from now, we aim to have directly impacted 90,000 people. 

The vast majority of the people we serve are those who buy our products, mostly smallholder farmers or workers in the informal labor sector, who were previously living on dirt floors. In addition to families living in healthier homes, we also create livelihoods, with 191 trained micro-franchisees across Uganda and Rwanda. These micro-franchisees also hire unemployed men and women as masons, to assist them in installing our floors and plasters. Each micro-franchisee hires an average of about two masons, resulting in a total of approximately 573 people who have gained employment because of EarthEnable.

By 2030, we aim to improve the health outcomes and fulfill the right to adequate housing of 5 million people by providing our low-cost earthen housing solutions. Replacing dirt floors with clean ones has not only been shown to reduce incidences of disease and infection, but also to encourage other sanitary practices and save time and resources spent cleaning. We measure progress on this goal by the total number of people served, customer satisfaction, and self-reported health improvements. 

EarthEnable also aims to promote inclusive economic growth by empowering 1,500 people to start their own rural housing businesses which each employ at least three masons, assisting over 6,000 people from low-income rural communities to at least double their income by 2030. Our metrics for measuring this impact are the number of people gaining full and productive employment, as well as the difference in income from before joining EarthEnable.

We plan to achieve these goals by catalyzing a global industry of affordable housing products across the world. By developing a replicable business model which profitably connects rural customers with our product, EarthEnable will mobilize partners and replicators to franchise the business and expand earthen construction solutions to new countries.

Our central goal in the next year is to position our micro-franchisees and master-franchise partners to dramatically scale our impact. 

One barrier is that micro-franchisees require several years of capacity-building before they can independently operate. To address this, we are taking a user-centered approach to micro-franchisee development, and learning from best practices employed by our successful micro-franchisees. Winning the Elevate Prize would allow us to invest more in developing effective micro-franchisee training, tools and support. 

Secondly, in order for our clean housing products to truly be accessible to all, our customers need access to financing. To overcome this, we are leveraging our strong government and community relationships to test creative financing options with cooperatives, and innovative savings schemes. The Elevate Prize would give us access to collaborators with whom we could design new approaches to financing for low-income families, which would significantly increase our franchisees’ customer numbers.

Finally, we need to identify potential partners to replicate our business through a master-franchise model to reach our scale ambitions. We are already leveraging our network to identify partners, and winning the Elevate Prize would enhance our profile and network to find them more readily.

The global platform and audience that the Elevate Prize would provide is exactly what EarthEnable needs to help us kickstart a rural housing industry. EarthEnable’s scale strategy is to develop a profitable business model which can easily be replicated by others, following the inspirational example of microfinance and solar home systems. Both of these are now successful industries worldwide thanks to large audiences and platforms leveraged by the early players, who used these platforms to communicate their impact and inspire others to join the movement. The Elevate Prize would do the same for EarthEnable, thereby making clean, affordable housing products accessible to millions of families worldwide. 

A tailored media campaign would also help EarthEnable build a worldwide movement that understands the urgency of transitioning to a global sustainable housing industry. As incomes slowly rise and the 1.4 billion people living in substandard homes turn to unsustainable construction materials like concrete, which is responsible for 8% of global carbon emissions, it is imperative that we develop sustainable alternatives. The Elevate Prize would raise awareness and encourage further innovations in sustainable housing, helping the world to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

EarthEnable strives to walk the talk in everything we do, aiming to lead with our anti-racist and anti-colonial values. Although I am a first generation minority American and spent a significant part of my upbringing in India, I recognize that I still have privilege and power as an expat founder in Africa, and aim to be a coach and partner rather than a boss and decision-maker. 

EarthEnable hires based on attitude and passion, not background. This is represented in our diverse management team: 96% of our managers started as entry-level employees, masons, or sales agents, demonstrating a truly inclusive company that invests heavily in people and enables anyone to grow into leadership. The entire leadership team of EarthEnable is East African (aside from myself), and 42% female. EarthEnable also decentralizes decision making to district leaders who have autonomy to run their district as they wish as long as they hit KPIs, and even further to micro-franchisees. 

While much of EarthEnable’s team is men, due to construction being a highly male-dominated field, we aim for the organization to be 65% female (including micro-franchisees and masons) by 2030. Interventions to achieve this include female-only micro-franchisee training, and mentorship for female team members.

My extensive field experience with grassroots NGOs, along with the user-centered design methodology I adopted from the design school project out of which EarthEnable was born, equipped me to serve in a very different context to the one I am from. My most important skill is my ability to deeply listen and empathically learn from our team, the vast majority of whom are micro-franchisees (or promoted micro-franchisees) and their masons, who represent those we serve. The best innovations and ideas have come from our field team - we give the team significant autonomy and room to test product and business model ideas, and then bring them together to learn from each other. This has been our primary driver of changes to our strategy, model, and product. Aside from me, our leadership team is entirely home-grown managers who are from the communities we serve, and 100% of our team has always been based in the countries we serve. Every teammate is required to spend significant time with customers, which keeps us grounded and in touch with how our program design and implementation can make the biggest impact.

In 2017, our customer surveys were reporting a satisfaction rate of only 70%. Our floors were not durable enough, our training and supervision of masons was inconsistent, and we did not provide sufficient after-sales support to our customers. I started to seriously doubt whether our vision of healthy living conditions for all would ever be realized.

I took several days away from the day-to-day to reflect deeply, and sought advice from mentors and my board. I realized that we’d focused too much on the scale, and not nearly enough on the fundamentals. We slowed down and barely grew for two years. But we were hard at work: we redesigned our mason training program, built a Quality Assurance Department, revamped our R&D department to focus on product improvement (which I ran for 1.5 years myself), restructured and re-incentivized the team to prioritize after-sales service, trained all customers in product maintenance, and developed systems to obsessively track quality.

Today, we have a team who is fully committed and accountable to delivering quality service and a product that we are proud to sell, resulting in 99% of our customers saying that they would recommend our floors to a friend.

• Chicago Ideas Week 2015
• TEDx Nyarugenge 2016 
• USAID Global Innovation Week 2017
• Earth USA 2017; 2019
• Postcode Lottery Green Challenge 2017
• Africa Green Growth Forum 2018
• Finding Impact Podcast 2018
• SOCAP Virtual 2020
• African Union for Housing Finance Annual Conference 2020
• American Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Meeting 2021

EarthEnable is currently poised to fundamentally disrupt the rural housing industry in Africa. Winning the Elevate Prize will accelerate our ability to scale by giving us a robust network of mentors and fellow prize winners to learn from, enhancing the skills of our leadership through the Elevate Academy, increasing our financial resources, and building our platform to spark a global movement towards a low-cost sustainable housing future. 

EarthEnable will use the Elevate funding to develop robust, vetted training strategies and data systems to track and enhance micro-franchisee progress, expand access to our micro-franchisee program for females in rural areas, roll out our new stronger adobe block product, and scale to a total of 50 districts across Uganda and Rwanda as well as at least one additional country through a partnership model. 

Becoming an Elevate Prize winner would also serve to amplify EarthEnable’s vision and innovations, enabling us to mobilize a diverse range of players to innovate new green housing products, start their own affordable housing businesses as our partners or replicators, and advocate for the use of eco-friendly housing products which are accessible to all.

Partnerships are key to EarthEnable’s strategy for scale and impact. Our most important partners are our micro-franchisees, who deliver our products in their communities along with teams of masons. We also work extremely closely with local governments: we signed an MOU with the national Ministry of Local Government in Rwanda, and our district teams work with local leaders in all levels of government who support us in marketing our products and even purchase our products on behalf of vulnerable families. Another important community partner is local cooperatives: EarthEnable enters into low-risk financing agreements with these cooperatives, making our floors even more financially accessible for rural families.

EarthEnable also partners with national governments, especially in conducting policy work to ensure the earthen housing industry we are building can be responsibly regulated. In 2019, EarthEnable co-founded a think tank in Rwanda with the Rwanda Housing Authority dedicated to developing legal standards for earthen construction, in collaboration with government agencies as well as academic and commercial stakeholders. The Local Building Materials Think Tank has just completed a standard for constructing houses using adobe blocks in Rwanda, which EarthEnable hopes can be used worldwide as a legal standard for the earthen construction industry.