Business
Profile: Edwin Broni-Mensah, founder of GiveMeTap
Edwin Broni-Mensah
Edwin Broni-Mensah had a simple idea, but intends to turn that idea into a global “water revolution”.
Some years ago, an idea to create a re-usable water bottle to raise money to irrigate Africa’s drought-stricken communities was conceived by 26-year old Edwin Broni-Mensah.
It was through playing squash at university that Broni-Mensah came up with GiveMeTap. Throughout his PhD, sport was his sanctuary, yet something didn’t add up: “Tap water is free and portable yet I was spending GBP £5 (US$8) a day on bottled water. I was like, ‘Wha’?'”
The concept of GiveMeTap was born, launched online for a song, and in 2010, won him an award as “most outstanding black student in Britain”. It works like this: you buy a tidy blue bottle made from recycled aluminum for GBP £7 (US$11.30) from his website and take it into any cafe which has signed up as a “provider” of the scheme. Your bottle is then filled with tap water for free, thus reducing the wastage in landfill sites, helping communities in Africa install clean water pumps, (70 percent of the GBP £7 goes towards this) and saving you money.
Although the scheme currently operates solely in the Manchester area, Broni-Mensah has moved in with his parents in Edmonton, north London, in order to launch it in London, it’s hoped, in time for the Olympics. In theory, he’ll be providing 1 million people with access to clean water by 2013.
How did he manage to launch the project while also completing his PhD? “I follow Parkinson’s Law: work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. I think that captures it very nicely.”
Broni-Mensah thinks our “peculiar obsession” with buying plastic bottles is “little more than a cultural conditioning”. Furthermore: “We’re too proud to ask for free water in the same way we feel the need to buy potato chips to use a cafe’s bathroom.”
All very benevolent but still, given the current climate, it seems insane to invest seven years of education into a non-profit scheme, subsidizing your rent by tutoring maths when you could be making a packet in the City. “I know,” he laughs. “All my friends are bankers and I’m their poor student mate. But it’s my choice.”
And, frankly, there are enough bankers to go round, allowing people like Dr Broni-Mensah to turn staggeringly obvious ideas into life-changing schemes.
Source: The Guardian