An Inspiration For Africa's Youth “give Us This Day Our Daily Taps”

GiveMeTap: EDWIN BRONI-MENSAH's success story

25 year-old, United Kingdom-based Ghanaian entrepreneur Edwin Broni-Mensah is a wonder kid in every sense of the word. At his age, he has so much to show for a life well lived. His status as Chief Executive Officer of GiveMeTap puts him above the very challenges most young black Africans in the Queens land face on daily basis.

Years ago, an idea to create re-usable water bottles to raise money to irrigate some of Africa's drought-stricken communities, came up whiles playing squash with his PhD colleagues at the Manchester University .

The very puzzling detail of why and how on earth, tap water, even though nature's finest source of drinking water was rare in that part of the world and using that opportunity gap as a catalyst to support initiatives back home here in Ghana and other African countries, got him thinking.

“Tap water is free and portable yet I was spending a fiver a day on bottled water. Our peculiar obsession with buying plastic bottles is little more than a cultural conditioning. We're too proud to ask for free water in the same way we feel the need to buy crisps to use a café's loo. Many local people back home become so desperate for water they steal from the main water supply and redirect it to their own homes. I felt it was important to raise awareness,” he once said.

Originally started as a business idea that enables people in and around Manchester to fill a special aluminum bottle with water at eateries; the GiveMeTap initiative has outgrown its small Manchester market into a big-time countrywide seller. All across the United Kingdom, it remains the new drinking tool you want to try. Plans are underway to make the scheme ready for the 2012 Olympics and an overall projection that would see some 1 million people all over the world provided with access to clean water by 2013.

Plus, with GiveMeTap, there are no losers – consumers get free water, café owners get free publicity, and help goes to those in need.

From expounding the perils of toxic BPA plastic bottles to packaging them for most restaurants, cafes and eateries across the United Kingdom, Broni-Mensah launched GiveMeTap online in 2009 and subsequently won the award for Future Leaders Magazine's Most outstanding Black student in Britain and also a £1,000 Shell LiveWIRE Grand Ideas Award in 2010 at the NACUE 'Business Not As Usual' conference in London where he beat 23 other young professionals.

The formula for using GiveMeTap is so simple it doesn't require a muscle strain: you buy a tidy blue bottle made from recycled aluminum for £7 from the GiveMeTap website (www.GiveMeTap.co.uk) and take it into any cafe which has signed up as a provider of the scheme. Your bottle is then filled with tap water for free, thus reducing the wastage in landfill sites and helping communities in Africa install clean water pumps (70% of the £7 goes towards this).

All over Africa, there is that huge cry of “give us this day, our daily taps” and hopefully Broni-Mensah's GiveMeTap would be able to match up to the task.

In his home country Ghana where he was inspired by the plight of many rural-urban households, access to portable water still remains a challenge with most communities in the capital Accra, facing shortage.

With the United Nation's Millennium Development Goals for improved water supply and sanitation by 2015 staring Ghana and the continent in the face, an idea like his, isn't bad a starter.

It's been a long winding road for the young Ghanaian but today, out of the ordinary he has been able to ignite a whole new generation of the UK and Africa's twenty-something upstarts who are calling the shots and dictating how and what the future of entrepreneurship should look like.

The UK's Guardian website, in a write up about his exploits said Edwin Broni-Mensah is a “Philanthropist whose scheme is either naively idealistic, brilliant or both. Either way, as soon as you've read about his idea, you'll be kicking yourself for not having thought of it”.

Whichever way you look at it, Dr. Ewdin Broni-Mensah's GiveMeTap is an idea whose time has come and a reason why Africa's youth can still have a good laugh despite all the haziness.