Innovation

“Our aim is not to sell bottles of water, but to do this business as a means to have a social impact in other parts of the world”, says Antonio Espinosa de los Monteros, CEO of AUARA. “This social cause is actually the reason why our company exists and the foundation of everything that we do.” AUARA’s purpose is not about making money, but creating a sustainable business that can help others to get a basic human right - clean water, which is also the product this company commercializes in order to achieve this goal. The idea is not that this business helps others, but that this business was born to help others and at the same time it can sustain itself and its workers, providing them salaries and good work conditions.

AUARA divides its functions in two different sectors: first, they have their actual business side translated into the sale of water and there they have different departments (marketing, finances) and, on the other hand, there is another team that manages their social projects and their social impact. “For our projects, our team meets every week to discuss and work on the long-term objectives," says Monteros. Furthermore, there is not an extreme hierarchy between the workers of AUARA. “Each person has a very clear, different assignment and we are a horizontal organization; we share all the decisions and try to have communication among us," explains Monteros. AUARA is a little company that currently counts on around 10 workers, so it is easy to work in this way.

Inspiration

The idea for this project arose from the workers' first-hand experience seeing how other people do not have access to clean water in other parts of the world. Monteros had worked on several collaboration projects in Peru, Cambodia, and Ethiopia before AUARA started and claims that the main reason why people went to the hospital, particularly in Ethiopia, was related to the lack of clean water. This caused infections, stomach problems and malnutrition since there was no clean water and people there could not grow food. According to AUARA’s CEO, this is an actual problem and a global issue since it affects 700 million people in the world. “First, the basic thing to do is to solve the problem of the water," says Monteros.

Overall impact

In a few years, AUARA has managed to enter the market as a bottled water supplier and has also organized different projects to set up points of access to safe drinking water in third world countries. “One of my best experiences was in Benin when we ended our first project, a well for 2,000 adults and 500 children. People were so thankful, they fed us and lent us their only bed to sleep in at night," reports Monteros. On their website, they published the objectives they want to achieve by 2020:

- Access to clean water for more than 50,000 people that do not have it.

- Avoid the use of 10 million liters of oil for plastic packages.

- Invest more than 2.5 million euros in social projects.

- Reuse the plastic of 90 million of bottles.

But maybe the most important thing that AUARA has helped with is to raise the awareness of the problem of water for all those people that did not pay attention to it. Now those people know that they can help on this cause through an everyday act like buying a bottle of water. Furthermore, Monteros hopes that AUARA will serve as a model for people to set up social companies that do something good for the world.

Business benefit

AUARA does not have monetary benefits. The money they earn through water commercialization is used to finance company expenses such as their office, materials, distributors, salaries, and taxes, and they have minimum reserves. After that, all the remaining money goes to the social projects. “In a normal company, those benefits are distributed to the investors as a pay back for their investment and their work," explains Monteros. However, in AUARA there is a legal contract by which the shareholders do not get these benefits since they are used for the social projects. Every worker in AUARA does their job because they believe in its social cause and volunteers to help on it. Moreover, AUARA is still looking for new workers and aims to be able to provide good salaries to encourage the best to join them. However, it will always be required for these future workers that they will be involved in the cause.

Social and environmental benefit

AUARA not only focuses on UN goal number six (clean water and sanitation), but also takes care of the package of the water that they commercialize. This package is made from 100% renewable materials that they obtain from the companies that carry out the transformation of used materials into reusable materials. In addition to this, their social benefit lies in the fact that they spread the word of the problem of clean water.

Interview

Antonio Espinosa de los Monteros, Chief Executive Officer