Innovation

New Search Engine uses 70% of its profit to undertake water projects

Water is often taken for granted and typically not a focus in technology circles, being considered more a health and social issue across Africa.

A new initiative, Elliot For Water (E4W) is trying to change this through an innovative portal that spreads water crisis awareness and, more importantly, gives people an accessible, effective and sustainable solution to this problem. E4W is the search engine that is allowing more and more people to directly fund clean water projects, completely for free, by doing what they already do every day: search the web.

Though newly launched on the web, Elliot For Water is a reliable and updated search engine; its results are, in fact, fully provided by Yahoo, its main partner. Just like any other search engine, profit is made through the “clicks” of the users on the sponsored links, which on Elliot For Water are called Water Links. These, also known as Pay Per Click ads (PPC) are are positioned at the top of the results page and the publisher (the search engine) charges the advertiser every time the link is clicked.
In Elliot For Water’s case, the charges that are set to the advertisers for the clicks that his ad gets become a donation. In fact, 70% of the profit, raised from these Pay Per Click ads, is used to undertake safe drinking water projects.



This innovative business model has a unique selling point that distinguishes Elliot For Water from the other social enterprises. Traditional social enterprises, in fact, donate to humanitarian causes a part of their profit gained by selling a service or product to their customers; differently, Elliot For Water’s users are not required to spend any money, as to use the search engine is completely free.

Understandably, as a Social Enterprise and not a foundation or a non-profit, Elliot For Water does keep a part of the profit (more precisely 30%) to reinvest and develop.

With its humanitarian mission, “Elliot For Water is more than a search engine, it is a movement that wants to spread awareness and educate people about the real and aggravating water crisis and give them the power to change this condition, even if just with a small daily action.” explains Andrea Demichelis Founder & Managing Director of Elliot for Water.

Elliot For Water aims to provide safe drinking water with the Solwa solar still. Solwa is an innovative system to produce drinkable water from any polluted, salt or unsafe drinking water employing solar energy as its only power source. We will drink (water) to that.



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