SOCIAL IMPACT ENTREPRENEURSHIP

SOCIAL IMPACT ENTREPRENEURSHIP

by | Mar 3, 2015 | Article, Virtual Mentor Archive

 If you could solve one of the world’s biggest challenges, what would it be, and why? Here’s one young woman’s story. Seven years ago, a photo was posted on a website of a young woman in a bright yellow teeshirt standing with a shovel in her hand. She is standing in a neatly dug hole in a small village in Africa, along with a half dozen young men who are helping her. The hole they have just dug will soon include a plastic pipe to deliver wastewater from a nearby public toilet, a maze of bricks to create anaerobic and aerobic sections, and enough dirt to fill the hole. On top, they’ll plant a banana tree. Now, Bianca Griffith is CEO of AGUAinc an international wastewater utility and water treatment company based in Boulder, Colorado, that is currently building the largest sewage treatment facility in the world, in Africa – in a chemical-free, low-energy, sustainable way – using plants to help decontaminate the water. When finished, their project in the Gambia, will consist of four olympic sized pools of wastewater covered by AGUAinc’s floating green filtration system called ABIS, that offers the look and beauty of park land, instead of an unsightly, smelly dumping site for raw sewage. It uses a clean technology floating green filter system that uses macrofites to turn raw sewage and wastewater into a floating parkland. “The challenge for many developing countries,” says co-founder and COO of AGUA Inc, Pedro Tomas Delgado Ortiz, Unreasonable@sea entrepreneur who first met Griffith while on a visit to Boulder,  “is that unsafe water is the #1 leading cause of disease...