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Incofin invested €3 million ($3.2 million) in Spouts International, which distributes ceramic filters to enhance clean water access in East Africa. The funding came from the Belgium-based impact investor Water Access Acceleration Fund, or W2AF, which raised €36 million ($38 million) in March.
Since its 2011 launch, Spouts has served over 740,000 people, including 10,000 students, via its Filters for Schools program. It has installed more than 1,500 filters in refugee camps in South Sudan and Uganda.
More than two billion people worldwide lack access to safe drinking water. “Water access is at the nexus of gender equality and climate action,” said W2AF’s Aparna Pittie.
Spouts’ filters purify water without the need to boil water using wood or charcoal. It sells carbon credits based on the avoided emissions, which it says amount to one million tons of carbon emissions to date.
“Over half of our filters currently are funded by carbon credit projects. This is where we distribute a significantly subsidized cost to extremely rural households that are not commercially viable in our sales channels,” Spouts’ Daniel Yin told ImpactAlpha.
The funding will enable Spouts to expand its carbon credit initiative and double its reach in the next five years. It will also support an increase in manufacturing capacity to over 60,000 water filters per month, allowing Spouts to provide safe drinking water to over 300,000 people every month.
Water access
W2AF supports growth-stage companies with clean water solutions in Africa and Asia. Investors in the blended finance fund include French food giant Danone, Dutch nonprofit Aqua for All, BNP Paribas. USAID provided a first-loss tranche.
The fund last month invested €7.5 million in India’s Rite Water Solutions to install water purification systems in rural and urban centers.
