Meet the Team Behind: The Adventure Project

The Adventure Project creates jobs in underserved communities around the world by supporting local entrepreneurs who improve access to clean water, healthcare, agriculture, and other essential services. Their work helps break the cycle of poverty while creating lasting economic opportunity. Learn more here! 

Can you tell me about your mission?

We create jobs to empower communities to work their own way out of extreme poverty, for good. Ending extreme poverty in our lifetime is possible. We envision a world where everyone has the chance to work, thrive, and build a better future for their children. We invest in local African organizations that create jobs while solving social issues. We affectionately call them 'Adventures.' Handouts help today, but a good job changes the lives of an entire family. The more we teach people to fish, the faster we'll end extreme poverty.

How did The Adventure Project start? 

We launched The Adventure Project because we grew tired of seeing so many charities building a community project and then walking away. It's easy to drill a well. It's harder to build systems, checks-and-balances and financial mechanisms to keep a well working. When people have the skills to care for neighbors, life gets better, every day. We create jobs to tackle the world's most urgent issues: clean water, healthcare, hunger, and climate. For the last 15 years, our community has focused on what really matters— empowering local organizations to lead, teaching people valuable job skills, and creating sustainable impact that scales.

What makes your process different? 

We partner with local organizations who are experts in the field. We help with technology, marketing support, and funding so they can scale to create more jobs throughout Africa. We are data-driven and focus on the most-effective ways to lift people out of poverty while serving communities. This means we do a lot of surveys, we listen, and we ensure our work is working. Because of our work, community health workers are knocking on doors to check on new moms and their newborns. Farmers are sending their crops to the market, and their kids to school. Families can now fuel their dreams, thanks to their clean cookstoves.

Can you explain your core issue areas?

We focus on core four issues: climate, hunger, health, and water. Cooking over open fires is one of the world's biggest killers of women and children, and giving families safe cookstoves can make all the difference. 80% of the poor in Sub Saharan Africa are rural farmers, and 75% of them cannot afford to feed their own children. One irrigation pump can lift a farmer’s family out of poverty in as little as one harvest. Pregnant mothers and children still die from preventable causes, and training women to become Community Health Workers is an effective solution. 1/3 of all wells in Africa are currently broken. Training women to run affordable water treatment kiosks helps the entire community drink clean water at an affordable price.