Joel Mwale is also the Founder and Director of Skydrop Enterprise, a clean water supply company in Kenya. He created Skydrop when he was 16, which now has 32 employees in Kenya, with distribution across Kenya and exports to Uganda and Tanzania.
Education
Joel had attended African Leadership Academy (ALA), a two-year residential academy that is training the future leaders of Africa. ALA accepts about 100 students a year from a pool of 6,000 applicants, which makes it more difficult to attend than Stanford.
Career
At 16, Mwale changed the lives of more than 5,000 people in a community in Kitale when he helped them access clean drinking water.
He had contracted dysentery from contaminated water during a particularly dry season in Kitale. And when lying on his hospital bed recovering from the very serious bout of diarrhoea, the health risk in his community sparked an idea.
With savings of about Sh8,000, the knowledge of physics acquired at Friends School Kamusinga and some help from volunteers, Mwale built a borehole on some community farmland.
He installed a pump that would allow extraction of the water, providing clean, drinking water to hundreds of households in his village.
He was forced to drop out of Friends School since his family was unable to pay for his tuition. But this did not dampen his spirits.
He set out to find tuition fees and earn a little extra to support his family.
Coincidently, the idea for SkyDrop came to maturation when Mwale was caught in a rainstorm.
“I remember it was in April during one of the heavy rain seasons in Kitale. I was just walking as the rain poured and happened to spot a closed yoghurt shop. Next to it was a water tank that was storing the rainwater from the gutters of the roof.
After convincing the owner of the yoghurt shop to lease him the location, Mwale set out to find a purifying machine to filter the rainwater. He soon discovered that this piece of equipment was quite expensive.
The next three and half months saw Mwale knock on the doors of local banks and NGOs for funding, but they declined.
He turned to his 20-acre piece of family land, which had been lying fallow for years. He approached his mother about selling it, an idea she was initially opposed to. Eventually, however, he convinced her.
With the proceeds from the sale, Mwale bought a water purification machine for Sh430,000, and paid for the cost of operation to produce drinking water.
“We used to harvest rain water and focus on production during wet season. During the dry spells, we would market our product.”
Half a litre of water retailed at Sh17, and a litre at Sh31.
Initially, SkyDrop was only able at sell about 10 bottles a day as a result of significant competition from already established drinking water bottlers.
But after persistent campaigns, sales climbed, with the company making Sh25.6 million in profits last year, Mwale said.
He added that he used some of the cash he made to replace the family land he sold to fund his business.
The success of this project and the unfortunate turn of events that occurred afterwards ultimately led to the creation of SkyDrop Enterprises.
This is the social enterprise that has earned him global accolades.
In addition to providing clean water to his village, he skillfully converted the idea into a booming venture by bottling the water for sale across western Kenya and into Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and South Sudan.
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Joel Mwale
He had also just won a Google award (Zeitgeist Young Minds 2012) for being one of the Top 10 Brightest Young Minds in the World. The award saw him spend a lot of time in USA’s Silicon Valley. He spent time with people like Larry Page, the co-founder and chief executive of Internet search engine giant Google, and Sir Tim Berners-Lee, best known for inventing the world wide web.
Mwale is among a crop of young entrepreneurs who have overcome tremendous odds, and instead of crying foul over the unemployment crisis in Kenya, have gone the extra mile to create jobs.
Unemployment has gone up progressively from 6.7 per cent in 1978 to 40 per cent today.
He is now on a journey to building an African Google, Apple or Facebook. With other partners, he has founded Gigavia.com, a company that he says will likely offer solutions for how institutions can deliver education materials and also provide a platform for veteran entrepreneurs to mentor youngsters.
The company has offices in Kenya, South Africa and in Silicon Valley. It currently employees tens of programmers and administrative staff.
Joel Mwale Wealth
Joel Mwale, 21, has already sold a company for over US$500,000, travelled the world, and rubbed shoulders with several presidents.
Joel Mwale Awards and Recognitions
- Received recognition from Forbes Magazine in 2013 as one of 30 under age of 30 best youngest entrepreneurs in Africa.
- Was Awarded the Zeitgeist Young Minds Award in 2012 as one of the top 10 young minds in the world.
- Won the prestigious inaugural pan-African Award for young entrepreneurs – Anzisha prize. (2011)
- Presented at the AGCO Africa Summit 2012- Berlin Germany (see nearby video)
- Named African Leadership network fellow of the year at the 2011 ALN summit in Addis Ababa Ethiopia.
- Named AGCO Africa Ambassador alongside one other fellow from Zambia in for AGCO Africa summit 2011. (Video at right)
- Won the prestigious IB Inaugural Scholarship to the International School of Kenya 2011.
- Named finalist for McKinsey and Company’s first round social innovation contest 2011.
- Presently an ACTIS scholar at the African Leadership Academy.
- Won Principals award, Friends School Kamusinga, April 2011.
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