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Problem & Solution
Close to 4 million people in Peru lack access to clean water especially in the northern Jungle and Andean regions. Given this huge problem, Fernando, a 27-year old economist, founded Yaqua in 2011, a social enterprise that enables clean water access through water filter products & larger infrastructure projects in rural communities in Peru. It achieves this goal by subsidizing its charitable giving through sales of water to commercial & retail channels. To date, 1,000+ people from Iquitos, Huancavelica, Amazonas and Ayacucho have benefited from Yaqua’s work.
Scaling Impact
Yaqua strives to scale its impact by creating novel sources of income generation for communities in these regions. To this end, Yaqua plans to develop a new socially impactful product line of dried, healthy fruit snacks. Low-income fruit farmers will be trained and integrated into Yaqua’s supply chain, ultimately boosting their incomes. Yaqua’s great advantage is its well-established distribution channels, whereby the healthy fruit snacks are sold in the same channels as the bottled water ones (supermarkets, convenience stores, mom-n-pop stores).
Loan Use
Your Kiva loan will help equip and adapt the infrastructure of the new fruit processing plant which will provide small fruit farmers with a way out of poverty through a dignified and reliable source of income. By the end of 2020, Yaqua expects to work with 1,250+ fruit farmers and provide access to water to 2,000+ families.
