Tackle Extreme Poverty: Replace Dirt Floors

One Way to Tackle Extreme Poverty: Replace Dirt Floors

By Tony Frangie Mawad

A Rwandan child standing on his family’s new flaxseed oil floor.

Photo courtesy of EarthEnable

WHEN GAYATRI DATAR and some of her classmates from Stanford University traveled to Rwanda for a course on entrepreneurial design for extreme affordability, they encountered a country where around 75% of the population lived on dirt floors. Coughing was common from dust clouds formed during sweeping. Rain filled houses with mud and insects. And fecal matter, from humans and animals, was often on the ground.

“It was not only a challenge for health, but also for comfort and dignity,” said Datar, who used that 2013 class as a springboard to start a business that builds floors for rural Rwandans and Ugandans.

The organization, EarthEnable, added almost 3,600 new floors in the 12 months through July 2021, bringing its total number of floors built to just shy of 11,000. It plans to expand the number of districts where it operates in the two countries in 2022, as well as add to the 181 people it employs in its hybrid structure of being nonprofit in the U.S. and running the local businesses with a for-profit model.

For Datar and other activists focused on extreme poverty, floor replacement is a fast and cost-

effective way of improving living conditions

and public health, especially for children. Nevertheless, there are still only a handful of these efforts throughout the globe. That’s despite there being more than a billion people living in “informal settlements” with dirt floors, according to a 2015 analysis from Oxford University’s Poverty & Human Development Initiative.

While earlier public health programs focused on replacing dirt floors with concrete, EarthEnable sought out an alternative that wouldn’t create as many greenhouse gas emissions as producing concrete. Datar teamed up with her former classmate, Rick Zuzow, who studied biochemistry and was her co-founder in starting the organization. Zuzow created a flaxseed oil that, when poured

over an earthen floor, dries to form a plasticlike, waterproof and sustainable resin that

glues the surface together. The flaxseed is currently imported from India, but EarthEnable is planning to harvest it in Kenya to keep the entire project more local.

The goal was also to cut costs. The flaxseed oil sealant ranges from $2- to $5- per square meter or about $50 per house, which is paid by the households — all at once or in installments spread over six months. That’s cheaper than the $162 price tag for the concrete floors used in one of the earliest floor-replacement programs: Piso Firme in Mexico. www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-08-23/ one-way-to-tackle-extreme-poverty-flaxseed-oilfloors