Martin Fisher, co-founder and CEO of KickStart International, went to rural Kenya in 1985 as a Fulbright scholar to study poverty.Intending to go to Africa for ten months, he stayed for 17 years.At first, he worked on programs funded by governments and foreign aid agencies that would dig water wells and donate pumps and equipment to poor farmers. But those programs had a major drawback."The first time the pump would break down, no one would fix it, because nobody owned it," says Fisher, who earned a  Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Stanford in 1985.Worse still, there would be nowhere to buy a replacement, because the local suppliers had been put out of business by the influx of free equipment. Fisher soon ... [ Read more ]