ABSTRACT
KickStart was founded in Kenya in 1991 by Martin Fisher and Nick Moon (Moon), two visionary social entrepreneurs. In creating KickStart, Martin (Fisher) has created a model that is, by design, sustainable and easily replicated nearly anywhere in the world where people suffer grinding poverty. A significant portion of KickStart's resources were invested in its Tech Development department. In the mid-1990s, KickStart introduced a manually operated treadle pump costing US$100. The pump had the capacity to draw water from a surface source and direct it to where it was needed to irrigate crops. The design of the pump was inspired by a kind of treadle pump, mostly used in Bangladesh and India. Seeing that availability of water was not an issue, KickStart began to think about developing manually-operated micro-irrigation pumps that could easily move the water from the source to the fields.
