Martin Fisher

Biography

Martin Fisher is an award winning engineer and social entrepreneur who led the way in showing how social business models can be used to solve global poverty. Martin received his BSc at Cornell University, and his MSc and PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. In 1985 he went to Kenya on a Fulbright scholarship and in 1991 co-founded KickStart International (originally called ApproTEC), a non-profit social enterprise with a mission to enable millions of people across sub-Saharan Africa to earn a lot more money and climb out of poverty. KickStart works by designing and promoting low-cost technologies that poor but entrepreneurial individuals purchase and use to establish highly profitable businesses. Starting in 2000 KickStart has concentrated on the development and promotion of small-scale irrigation technologies. And to date over 350,000 smallholder farmers have used KickStart’s very low-cost irrigation pumps to grow and harvest multiple cycles of high value crops year-round, adapt to climate change and turn their subsistence farms into highly profitable enterprises—enabling over 1.3 million women, men and children to take a major step out of poverty. There is very little irrigation in sub-Saharan Africa, and millions more farmers there can use irrigation to gain sustainable income and food security, and feed the continent. Today KickStart partners with hundreds of development players to promote smallholder irrigation technologies in 16 sub-Saharan African countries, innovates new lowest-cost irrigation tools, and advocates to catalyze a movement to Irrigate Africa. Martin and KickStart have won numerous awards and accolades for their pioneering work including being named a; Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneur of the Year; Skoll Foundation Social Entrepreneur; Design News Engineer of the Year; Stanford Engineering Hero; and most recently a member of the Millions Lives Club.