Driven to Drink

Source: Food and Drink Digital

Date :07/05/2008 16:05:06

Social entrepreneurship changes lives, but a social enterprise has disciplines that are a good benchmark for any growing business, believes John O’Hanlon who talked to Duncan Goose, founder of One water

Written by John O’Hanlon

I don’t think I have ever heard the business case for social entrepreneurship set out as cogently as at a meeting of Enterprise Tuesday - the networking group run by the Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning at Cambridge - when Duncan Goose told a crammed lecture hall how you increase the odds of success when you are cash strapped, resource hungry and your only assets are your vision and determination. Setting up Global Ethics and the ‘One’ brand of drinking water taught him that success lies in increasing the odds in every way you can.

Born in Scotland, Duncan had a peripatetic upbringing spending much of his formative years in East Anglia and later attending what is now Coventry University. Talent and a taste for action seem to run in the family: his sister Claire is renowned for her appearances alongside Trevor Eve and Sue Johnson in 38 episodes of the thriller Waking the Dead.

Aged 20, Duncan found himself working in general marketing and advertising, a field in which he rapidly excelled. By the time he was 28 he was a business development director and board director earning a six-figure salary and working for a subsidiary of Martin Sorrell’s WPP, which he saw through a buy-out and subsequent merger into the J Water Thompson advertising group.

Unlike most rising stars of the corporate world, though, Duncan acted on the impulses most of us get at one time or another and ignore. In 1998, at the end of an affair, he chucked up the job, bought a motorcycle and set off to circumnavigate the globe. “I’d never travelled much after leaving university or indeed when I was at school,” he says. “Then I read about Ted Simon’s trip round the world [1980’s Jupiter’s Travels], sold everything I had and set off.” To travel was more important than to arrive, but there were a few significant moments of awareness.

Nor any drop to drink

One of these was in Honduras, which he reached in 1998 just as Hurricane Mitch also decided to visit, killing more than 30,000 people and causing $4 billion worth of damage. Duncan mucked in with the rescue work; however he and some other travellers set up a fundraising scheme to rebuild the village they were in. Enough money was raised to restore 13 villages. There was no lack of water there, indeed the place was awash, but you couldn’t drink any of it, so it was here that he began to realise the importance of clean water.

Back in London, having biked around Australia, India and Pakistan, Duncan turned to consultancy to earn his bread. It would be wrong to say his awareness of poverty was new found, but it had been sharpened by his experiences: even as he and a group of friends watched Barry Geraghty win the 2003 Grand National on the 16:1 Monty’s Pass in a pub in London, the talk turned to the billion people in the world who don’t have clean water to drink.

It was there and then that the concept of using the market for drinking water in the first world to fund its supply to the third was formed. “It took some refining, but it’s true to say that I walked out of there with the idea for One water.” For a while he continued working at the consultancy business he had set up to earn some money but as the new business took more - then all - of his time, he closed the door and devoted 100 percent of his energies to One water.

An element of obsession is probably no bad thing for an entrepreneur. Starting a new business is not a part-time job, as my contacts in Silicon Valley are always reminding me: you need to give it everything. Since he walked out of that pub, Duncan has kept his charitable foundation Global Ethics clearly focused on raising funds for humanitarian projects in developing countries, with the emphasis on water. “Water supply is not just about stopping people from dying of thirst,” he says. “In some communities people have to walk five hours a day to fetch water, which prevents them from being able to work or go to school, and keeps them in poverty. Two million people each year die from diseases related to unsafe water, including 1.8 million children from diarrhoea.”

A recent Panorama programme found that UK tap water is just as good as bottled water and revealed horrors like the fact that in Fiji there’s a massive plant exporting spring water to the UK while a third of that island’s population don’t have access to safe drinking water. So bottled water is a fad but for better or worse it’s a huge market – £2 billion annually in the UK; $15 billion in the USA. One water is sourced in Wales and bottled on the Welsh border, so unlike French or Fijian water it doesn’t have far to go to reach the depots of the suppliers which have been persuaded to stock it. You pay the going rate and are happy to, because “When you drink One Water, Africa drinks too. All profits, every last drop, go to building unique PlayPump water systems in Africa, which improve people’s lives by providing free, clean water.”

PlayPumps

That fact has not been lost on big businesses looking for CSR credits. French oil giant Total stocks and promotes One because a far-sighted manager saw the PR benefits of the association, while another client, World Duty Free, gets involved in the installation of PlayPumps - making a great story for the staff newsletter.

In South Africa, Duncan found Trevor Field, the founder of PlayPumps International and decided to devote the proceeds of One water to installing more of them. Trevor had come across the prototype of a child’s roundabout that pumps water in South Africa and developed it from a simple pump into a more complex water system with large capacity storage tanks and prominent advertising to draw in corporate revenue or carry information. He recognised it as an innovative, sustainable, child-friendly answer to one of the region’s most pressing problems.

“We put the roundabouts where the children are, usually in schools,” says Duncan. “Instead of trekking through the bush with containers they are playing as children should, getting an education, and they can have as much clean water for themselves and their community as they need.”

One water has funded PlayPumps in South Africa, Swaziland, Mozambique, Malawi, Lesotho, Zambia, Uganda, Ethiopia. There’s groundwater under most of the world’s arid land, Duncan assures me, so this scheme can go as far as resources allow, though for now the focus is on sub-Saharan Africa.

Pure fun

We all get a sense of outrage sometimes but Duncan’s attitude, and I have to say that of many other entrepreneurs who give their time and energy to social projects, has no taint of patronage. He says he does it for the joy of it. “For me it is about money. The fun of making it and the fun of giving it away. I have had the fun of a career in advertising: now I have all the fun and challenge of running a business with the added bonus of changing tens, hundreds, even millions of lives.”

The business has grown fast considering it doesn’t spend money on advertising. “One of the big players spent £3 million on an advertising campaign based on a £100,000 donation to clean water projects – that’s not for us,” says Duncan. Since the launch of Global Ethics in 2005, enough money has been raised through the sales on One water to install 101 PlayPumps, and that gives more than 252,500 African people easy access to clean and safe water.

Most of the overheads are taken care of by sponsors. For a long time the company was run out of Duncan’s flat, but last September, the five part time and five full time staff moved into central London premises provided by the company’s financial advisor trustee and ‘hero’ Paul Robinson (or rather they use it as their base, trying to foregather on a Wednesday but working wherever suits them best the rest of the time).

Duncan pays himself £6,000 a year, which in London is equivalent to a sub-Saharan income, and he doesn’t eat out much, making him a very different kind of entrepreneur. A triumph of goodwill over capitalism? Rather a capitalist model driven by goodwill and consumer rights wonderfully allied to consumer choice. Little wonder that Duncan Goose was voted one of ITV’s Greatest Living Britons last year – I nearly overlooked that! Just don’t remind him that Ted Simon has now done another motorbike circumnavigation at the age of 70.

Click here to view the full interview with Duncan Goose