THE TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF CLEAN WATER

This series of articles showcases our 2025 Impact Awardees. The Impact Awards are dedicated to former Cartier Women's Initiative Fellows who have achieved extraordinary impact. Each of these nine exceptional women impact entrepreneurs has an inspiring story to tell about her journey to success.

This is the story of Yvette Ishimwe, a 2023 fellow and 2025 Impact Awardee.

Yvette Ishimwe could not be clearer about the urgent purpose of her business, IRIBA Water Group, which makes clean water accessible and affordable for low-income communities across Africa. “Water is life and life is a human right,” she asserts. “No one should have to die or get sick for a lack of something so basic and so achievable as safe water.”

Yet in Yvette’s home country Rwanda, where she founded IRIBA, that is exactly what happens, with only 57% of the population of the East African country having access to potable water within a 30-minute journey from their home.

Born of necessity

IRIBA was born of lived experience. As a child, Yvette’s family moved from Kigali to a rural village where there was no indoor plumbing or accessible drinking water. Faced with this challenge the young Yvette researched solutions for purifying water from a nearby lake, introducing a fix that served not only her family but their entire community. These early entrepreneurial forays eventually led to her setting up IRIBA as a university student.

IRIBA’s offering is two-pronged, targeting both health and livelihoods. Its core product, Tap&Drink, is a smart water ATM that can be connected to any source of dirty water to purify and dispense it at a low cost. Additonally, ATMs are operated on a frachise model, fueling local entrepreneurship, creating jobs, driving economic growth and uplifting communities, with a special focus on empowering women and youth.

Lifting health and opportunity outcomes

Now operational across the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic, IRIBA’s impact has been startling. Since its inception, the business has provided 517,412 people with safe drinking water.

Moreover, where its water ATMs are installed in schools, there has been a 37% reduction in waterborne diseases among students, lifting both health and opportunity outcomes. “By providing clean water, we've helped reduce absenteeism in schools due to illness,” Yvette explains. “This improvement in health enables students to attend school regularly, enhancing their academic performance and future prospects.”

IRIBA’s franchise model has further boosted propsects by creating 194 permanent jobs, of which 86% are held by women, an achievement of which Yvette is especially proud. She recalls a young franchisee who was able to put herself through unversity thanks to the increased earning capacity enabled by her job with IRIBA. “That story really touched my heart. It may not necessarily be a franchise-holder’s dream to run an ATM, but it can be their means of achieving that dream.”

Transforming mindsets

Yvette explains that when IRIBA first launched, persuading people that affordable water was safe water was challenging to say the least. “People couldn't understand why we would sell water that is 70% cheaper than bottled water,” she recalls.

However, thanks to IRIBA’s water, sanitation and hygiene education campaigns, which have reached over 2.8 million people, the tide is turning. Today, Yvette explains, people not only understand the importance of drinking clean water, they also know that it need not cost the earth. In turn, this has influenced the wider commercial landscape, nudging bottled water companies towards offering more affordable options of their own. Yvette describes the development not as competition but as “mission accomplished!”

Targeting the Global Goals

For any impact entrepreneur, though, it is never really mission accomplished. This is demonstrated by IRIBA’s growth plan, which has the 2030 deadline for achieving the Global Goals firmly in its sights.

Included in that vision is what Yvette describes as an “Uber-like” platform for water and energy technicians. While ensuring timely maintenance of IRIBA’s systems the platform will provide decent incomes for at least 25,000 people in the next five years, further targeting Goal 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth).

Yvette explains that, crucially, IRIBA also aims to reach five million people with safe drinking water by 2030, playing a significant part in delivering on Goal 6 (Clean Water and Sanitation).

“I wake up every morning with that dream, with that desire to make clean water available to as many people as I can.”