Profiles of Purpose: Clear As Water

Meet Samuel Appenteng, managing director of Joissam Ghana, a company working to make clean water more accessible to rural communities in West Africa. By collaborating with the communities his firm serves, Appenteng is pumping hope and health into the people who need it most.

Unfortunately, the scale of the problem is immense. Appenteng explained, “In sub-Saharan Africa, over 320 million people have no access to potable water. As we went more and more into the rural communities and saw the kind of deprivation and denials of a decent living, I began to realize that we need to bring relief to people.”

From groundwater exploration and research drilling to water quality analysis and water treatment, Joissam is changing lives with clean water. Joissam began its work in Ghana, but the company has already expanded to seven more countries: Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Togo, and Gabon in Central Africa. Its approach is unique: to involve the community in the clean water effort from the very beginning. 

“They will all come around and help you as you go and pass the lines to be able to start sending electrical charges into the earth,” Appenteng said. And once drilling starts, he continued, “You will have everybody in, down there observing, and there's a lot of tension. And then the technical team was saying, we are getting there. We're getting there. You start getting a lot of excitement. Believe you me, as soon as you hit water, and it starts gushing out, women and children start jubilating like it's a football game with a lot of goals.”

Listen to Appenteng’s mini profile to hear how his company is increasing its impact across Africa and providing health and economic benefits to millions.

And for more information on the Executive Program in Women’s Leadership mentioned at the top of the episode, visit https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/exec-ed/programs/executive-program-womens-leadership

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