Impact enterprises

Dharma Life is building a network of female change leaders who drive behaviour change and provide access to socially impactful products to rural households.

Maya provides a mobile-based digital wellbeing assistant that eliminates barriers – particularly for women – to accessing health advice from experts.

Bhumijo provides access to clean, inclusive and technology-enabled toilets – in markets and other public spaces – through a subscription or pay-per-use model.

Folia Water’s nanosilver-infused Folia filter paper is the world’s first water filter for pennies, not dollars.

Designed by women, for women, this confidential and convenient digital and last mile distribution platform sells health and household goods.

Spring Health provides affordable, safe drinking water to underserved households, using innovative purifying methods, distributed via its rural network.

Saraplast provides safe and hygienic public toilets to women and girls by converting old buses into beautiful, static public toilets.

Drinkwell provides affordable, safe drinking water to people living without piped water, using water ATM machines and pay-as-you-go, prepayment cards.

Almost 20 percent of Bangladeshis do not have access to a source of clean, safe drinking water and 44 percent do not have access to a functioning sanitation system. This results in poor health conditions and environmental degradation, with water contaminated by waste. Shobar Jonno Pani (SJP), or Water for All, was created in 2010 by French NGO, Eau et Vie. It works to ensure permanent access to reliable, treated water services in deprived urban neighbourhoods, by providing piped water directly to homes at an affordable price. SJP has an agreement with communities and local authorities to build and distribute their water networks, as well as build a billing and payment network. It also provides behaviour change and community support, such as awareness about the importance of drinking clean water and builds fire hydrants into the water network, training a squad of female firefighters from the local community to use them. TRANSFORM funded the testing of a new service selling biofil toilets, using earthworms to treat waste, similar to a garden composter. The project helped SJP to scale the business in Dhaka and put in place a customer-facing value proposition, a brand logo and materials to publicise the business. A video was also created. Through TRANSFORM, the Unilever team also shared behaviour change experience to help SJP develop campaigns on menstrual health management and handwashing, adapting Lifebuoy materials for a low-income context for the first time. This included interactive elements via posters, puzzles and story books, immediately increasing understanding among school children and women. During the pandemic, training for staff to use personal protective equipment and maintain services safely was also included.

MESH is the first online community for young entrepreneurs in the informal economy, helping them to boost skills and earnings.

Aerosan supplies innovative public toilets and handwashing facilities – harvesting rainwater to flush toilets and turning waste into biogas fuel.

HappyTap advocates for a new normal in hand hygiene – putting handwashing within reach in low-income settings.

Loowatt has created a waterless flush toilet system for low-income communities without access to sewers. 

MAWASCO offers a service to empty pit latrines in low-income communities.

Pit Vidura offers safe and affordable pit latrine emptying services, employing previously marginalised waste workers.

Fresh Life – founding partner of The Sanergy Collaborative – builds cost-effective and eco-friendly sanitation products and services delivered in cities.

Southern Water and Sanitation Company (SWSC) is a public water and sanitation utility company, providing clean drinking water and sanitation services.

Sunlight Water Centers combine a borehole and retail kiosk to create a sustainable business model to build and maintain boreholes.

SWEEP was created by Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP) to give low-income households access to affordable septic tank emptying services.

Sanivation operates waste-to-resource treatment plants which combine human waste with agricultural waste to produce solid fuels to heat factories.

Waste4Change collects and recycles waste responsibly from companies and households.

IMAGINEIF npc is a purpose-developed sustainability innovation not-for-profit company turning unrecyclable plastic material into pavers and other building blocks used for landscaping.

Sesa Recycling is collecting and recycling plastics to create new products.

Hasiru Dala Innovations (HDI) is a for-purpose, Indian company providing waste-picker-powered circular economy solutions in keeping with its ethos of Inclusive Circularity™.

Mr Green Africa creates sustainable social, environmental and economic impact through the collection, conversion and sale of post-consumer plastic waste.

The Refill Bangladesh project is designing and piloting a scalable refill distribution model to tackle plastic pollution

Refill and Reuse Indonesia is a unique, scalable refill station project in low-income community channels such as convenience stores.

Sampurn(e)arth provides end-to-end decentralised waste-management solutions with a focus on delivering livelihood opportunities for informal wastepicker communities.

Taka Taka Ni Mali is a woman-led enterprise, promoting green jobs and a circular economy through waste management.

Taka Taka Solutions recycles single-use plastic containers and flexible packaging in partnership with waste pickers and factories in Kenya.

Wecyclers is a rewards-for-recycling platform, incentivising people to exchange recyclable waste – collected via cargo bikes or “wecycles” – for essential goods.

As a global technology company, TrashCon has developed patented solid waste sorting solutions that diverts over 90 percent of waste from landfills and converts it into value.

The Social Factory is a community enterprise focussed on developing a new model for plastic recycling and social inclusion.

Baeru is a women-led climate action organisation helping to make India’s coastline resilient, through the mitigation and recovery of ocean plastic.

Ashaya makes the world’s first recycled sunglasses from packets of chips, while empowering waste pickers out of poverty.

Refillable is a zero single use packaging platform that provides doorstep delivery to customers.

Transforming plastic waste into alternative materials for sustainable infrastructure development.

Recity Network is a circular waste management company with the vision to keep plastic in the economy and outside the environment.

doctHERs is a health-tech that reintegrates female healthcare providers into an agile, gender-inclusive workforce and promotes health equity using mobile health and intermediary-assisted telemedicine.

Jeeon provided a simple app that connects pharmacies to drugs, products, knowledge and tools to better serve their patients.

Malaica provides a midwife-led programme that offers support, guidance and resources to help pregnant women navigate pregnancy with confidence and ease.

NaijaCare is a digital community created by Every1Mobile to improve the service offered by proprietary and patent medicine vendors (PPMVs).

reach52 is a healthtech social enterprise with the mission to redesign healthcare to reach 52 percent of the world without access.

U Join and U Afya were mobile-enabled platforms to provide shopkeepers with access to e-learning, and customers with product promotions and health information.

The ICHP programme aimed to combat the prevalence of malaria and dengue fever in urban and rural Myanmar, using insecticide-treated screens and bed nets.

Boost is a B2B commerce platform powering Africa’s convenience economy by providing radically easy technology for suppliers to better serve retailers.

The Duka+ project removes pain-points for owners of small, informal and traditionally cash based shops known as dukas, creating efficiencies while driving growth.

Powered by People is a wholesale marketplace, enabling sustainable small-batch makers worldwide by giving them access to global markets.

Well Told Story designs and tests an inclusive connectivity model that provides more engaging content for women and young people.

ZayoHub piloted a viable ‘final mile’ business with a range of revenue streams that improve health and wellbeing.

d.light is a global leader in social transformation by making sustainable products available and affordable to low-income families.

My Sunshine is a patented modular solar home system designed for low-income households that live off the grid.

Regenerating Mint with Farmer Champions is a project to improve mint farming practices, increase crop yield and improve rural community incomes.

Shea Innovates brings rural female workers together in co-operatives to produce quality, handcrafted shea butter and provide a year round, sustainable income.

Transforming of Production Palm Sugar in Myanmar (ToPPS) SNV tested an innovative business model to improve palm sugar processing through cookstove entrepreneurship.

Ubuntu Power provides solar power and unrestricted internet to off-grid communities.

ASPEN was an innovative income diversification programme that leveraged cocoa cooperatives to distribute high-impact products through farmers as sales agents.

The Farm Services and Income Diversification Project aimed to increase income among cocoa producers and strengthen the resilience of farming households.

Clinton Guistra Enterprise Partnership (CGEP) and TRANSFORM ran an inclusive distribution pilot project working with female entrepreneurs in Nigeria.

D2D Pro is a plug-in module that provides training to female door-to-door (D2D) sales agents, giving them the skills and knowledge to expand sales.

Digital Agents for Energy+ invested in the development of the energy provision market by providing refugee and host community members with income-generating opportunities.

ENVenture helps rural community-based organisations (CBOs) to learn business skills to launch their own sustainable enterprises selling clean energy products.

Farm to Market Alliance (FtMA) supports African smallholder farmers to transition to commercial agriculture. 

Frontier Markets is a tech-first social commerce platform for rural India, providing local access to high-quality, climate-friendly, gender-inclusive products and services.

Kidame Mart empowers rural female entrepreneurs to provide last mile distribution of high impact, fast-moving consumer goods.

The TRANSFORM funded Mercy Corps project encouraged women and young people to start their own microenterprises selling clean cookstoves.

Heroes for Change (H4C) harnesses the power of university students to prepare them for the marketplace through technology to deliver social impact programmes in their own communities.

DrugStoc was founded to empower healthcare practitioners. TRANSFORM is helping achieve this in low-income communities.

The Dyuty project will provide meaningful connectivity for women in rural Bangladesh to create a last mile distribution network of women entrepreneurs.

Aye aims to address the working capital scarcity of Kirana (grocery store) owners by designing a gender inclusive ‘buy now, pay later’ (BNPL) product.

Busara conducts research to understand barriers to recycling, and design interventions to overcome them.

Busara researched the potential impact of Duka+ to inform the product roadmap and ongoing product design.

TRANSFORM worked with Inclusive Business Sweden to explore how peer-to-peer technologies could improve the sharing of sanitation services in developing markets.

TRANSFORM funded research into how IAI can be engaging in low literacy, low connectivity, and low base expertise contexts.

Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs is a world leader in behaviour change communication for public health, running two research projects in Kenya.

TRANSFORM commissioned research to investigate the potential of online networks to initiate social norms change about family planning in offline communities during COVID-19.

The University of Colorado has implemented a large-scale cookstove programme in Rwanda to encourage use of healthier propane cookstoves.

The Where India Goes project explored solutions for safe defecation before the demand and supply of improved sanitation is increased.

The Zambia Sanitation research project built an understanding of the sanitation landscape and market-based solutions by testing social business models.