For most of us a bar of soap is merely a part of our daily ritual, something that we pick up casually at a store every month, or choose diligently for its fragrance and brand. At the end of a good wash, the squeaky clean feeling that it leaves behind eggs us ahead with a renewed energy to deal with life’s challenges. Just imagine a day when you have to do without a soap bar. I can almost hear the “eeks” out there.
Soap, though, is a luxury for several people in parts of Africa and Asia. Emily Wafau, a little girl who lives in Kenya, was one among the many who received a bar of soap this August, when a shipment from Atlanta reached the African shores. Making this possible was Global Soap Project (GSP), a non-profit organization, founded by Derreck Kayongo and his wife Sarah in 2009.
So, one might wonder, what is the big deal about supplying soap bars to the less privileged?
The big deal is that each soap bar is reborn from discarded soap bars: the ones people leave behind after use in hotels.
Talking about this novel experiment, Sam Stephens, GSP’s executive director, explains, “Every week around five thousand or more pounds [more than 2, 260 kilograms] of soap is delivered to our warehouse from hotels.”
It trickles in through the week, in batches every day. At the warehouse, the collected soaps are first sorted out based on their colour and content.
“This is important so that we don’t mix colours, and ingredients such as oatmeal and glycerine which cannot be processed in our machine.”
The next step involves grinding the soap and passing it through a soap-making machine. Out slips the final product in its new avatar, shining bars, and a far cry from the unattractive scrap that was tossed in.
“A new bar is a little more than 100 grams, or four ounces,” Sam says. Samples from each batch are tested for pathogens in a lab. Once certified, the bars are packed into boxes and then transported by ship to various countries.
In August a shipment of 120,000 reached Malawi, where soap bars were included in water hygiene kits and distributed to pregnant women in prenatal clinics as an incentive for regular check-ups. This should help improve the health of newborns and mothers.
“This is the first time we were working with [Atlanta-based] Centres for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC],” Sam says.
“The women will be taught on the use of soap and the importance of hygiene and hand wash, especially while handling infants. The project is a collaboration between the CDC, the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), PSI, and other leading international NGOs. We’re proud to be part of the effort.”
On any given working day the warehouse of GSP in Atlanta is a beehive of activity as volunteers go about their chores. A load is getting ready for shipment to Ghana where it will benefit students of a school for the hearing- and speech-impaired.
“We are looking at sending 45,000 bars,” Sam says.
Another consignment of 44,000 bars was sent to a prison and an orphanage in Ghana. In Kenya, GSP partnered with a local organisation to assess the sanitation and hygiene needs of female inmates at Naivasha Women’s Prison.
Joining in the conversation, Lilly Dimling, operations director, mentions another project in Malawi. “That was in association with Partners in Health (PIH), an international health organisation committed to improving the health of the poor and marginalised. PIH took 24,000 bars in June 2012 for distribution across 11 communities in the Neno district of Malawi.
“It will be an ongoing partnership between PIH, its local partner, APZU, and GSP, and 1600 households will get monthly supplies of our soap.”
Shipments have been sent to other parts of the world too. One was dispatched to Haiti this year — around 90,280 bars for distribution to students, street children and young mothers.
Bars of soaps have gone as far as the Latin American countries, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Bangladesh directly and to 23 other countries, including Haiti, Uganda, Swaziland, Kenya, Ghana and St Lucia, through NGOs.
Laudable is an understated description for the efforts undertaken by GSP in improving health and hygiene of the less privileged, credit for which goes to one man, Derreck Kayongo, who dared to think beyond himself.
Derreck Kayongo’s journey
A native of Uganda, Kayongo’s family fled his country to escape the tyranny of Idi Ameen in 1979 and took refuge in neighbouring Kenya. Derreck was 10 years old then. His father, who was running a soap-making business and managing a printing press, lost everything in the war.
“As refugees in Kenya, we lived in an unfortunate situation where we had to do without soap,” Derreck recalls. “I realised then how blessed we had been back home to have soap every day. The cultural shock of having to learn a new language, Swahili, and making new friends was hard, but it was also great for me because these friends played a big role in my building GSP.”
In Kenya, he met Marge Campbell, a missionary from Pittsburg, who was working there as a youth director. “My mother took us to attend the church in which Marge had come to serve. As a young child I was taken on by Marge for her Sunday school teaching. Later, into my youth, she became one of my mentors.”
Moving to the United States, this business administration and management graduate worked as programme director of American Friends Service Committee in charge of Sub-Saharan education processes and as director, southeast region, of Amnesty International, which fights for the rights of political prisoners unjustly incarcerated by their governments.
Derreck is now the senior southeast regional advocacy director, Care USA.
An executive and a development expert, Derreck, has more than 15 years of experience developing strategic social campaigns within organisations for cause-related advocacy, public policy, issue management and community organising. He has made a profound contribution in raising awareness aimed at realising permanent solutions to global poverty.
The spark
The inspiration for the idea of GSP came to him in 1992 when he checked into a hotel in the US. “I noticed there were different types of soaps in the room. I took the ones I had used and noticed that they were replaced the following day. So I went to the concierge and asked him if he was going to charge me for the soaps that I had taken and I wanted to return them. He laughed. When I asked him what they did with leftover soap bars, he told me that they just threw them out,” Derreck recalls. “I was 22 then and new to the country, I did not know what to do. I gave up the idea to the universe and hoped that it will wait for me when I was ready.”
In 2009, the idea nudged Derreck. He approached Vicki Gordon, vice-president of InterContinental Hotels, at that time. “I knew Vicki through my work at Care International. I felt it would be easy for Vicki to communicate my idea to other hotels,” he says.
Vicky chips in: “When Derreck shared the idea with me it was like a light bulb that came on and I said, ‘Wow.’ How come we had not thought about this?”
Vicki got in touch with hotels under the Georgia Hotel Association and arranged for a presentation of Derreck’s idea. At the end of her presentation 13 hotels signed up right away.
“It was truly one of those things,” Vicki says. “We have never solicited hotels. The idea spread by word of mouth. It is a simple concept that is understood by all and has been turned into a potentially saving thing. People don’t ask for details. When people hear it, most of the time, it is kind of ‘duh.’”
Forming a board with people of different areas of expertise and studying various aspects of recycling was the next step. The first batch of soap came from Atlanta hotels. Derreck used his retirement savings to buy the first machine.
“Once hotels heard about this idea they started sending soap to our home. We stored it in our basement and garage,” Derreck says. The first batch of soap was also prepared in their basement. “Actually my wife Sarah and our son Kevin were my first two employers,” he laughs.
“Yes,” nods Sarah. “In May 2009, the first batch of recycled soap came out well but after a few days the bars had shrunk and hardened, obviously not the results we had anticipated.
“The problem of course was because we didn’t have the right equipment that we have now. Nevertheless, this was showed we were on to something big. We had tested the concept and we knew it would work.”
Another roadblock that the Kayongo couple encountered involved the transportation of soap. There were times when Sarah and Derreck drove to many hotels in Georgia and the rest of the southeast to pick up soap.
“The costs associated with this were so high and we had to foot the bill from our meagre family income and savings,” Sarah says.
MMS Enterprises, a family-run property management firm in Georgia, donated warehouse space to accommodate the growing number of soap bars, and the first year of operation was spent proving that the concept could actually work.
“The roadblocks were many but two were really the back-breakers. One was capital investment to do this on a large scale. Secondly the crafting of the message to get hotels and other actors interested in the concept,” says Derreck, who figured among the top ten CNN Heroes 2011 and was a winner of the Regional Classy Award this year. “No one had tried this before and people were sceptical because of that. To convince people of its safety and that the project will work has been a challenge. Yes there were moments when I did find the road hard. It was tough to get donors aboard and to put the business plan for something that had not been tried before.”
GSP purchased their second soap-making machine this year. Volunteers from all age groups and different walks of life keep the wheels of this unique soap factory turning while eight regular staff members manage the NGO.
Derreck, also a motivational speaker, has delivered more than 300 speeches on key issues related to global health and poverty reduction, often drawing on his personal experiences.
If there are roadblocks, rewarding moments aren’t far away, as Derreck would find out: “There were several but one that comes to mind immediately was of a shipment that was sent to Kenya. It carried 5,000 soap bars to an orphanage, their supplies for a whole year. It was a nice feeling because that was where I had spent my years as a refugee.”
So what keeps him going?
“My failings serve as an impetus and inspiration to get up and try again. This is my underlying principle. My network of influential friends makes it easy for me to get things done. Then my can-do mentality inspired by my experience of war, which can be the right formula needed to make things happen.”
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What they say:
Vicki Gordon is founder of Collins Gordon Group, (a public affairs firm that provides strategic counsel on business strategies for social change). She has more than 30 years of experience as a corporate executive including 19 years with InterContinental Hotels Group.
A founding member of GSP, Vicki says, “I believed the idea would work, right from the moment Derreck shared it with me. It has been a wonderful journey. The most rewarding moment is when we watch pictures and videos of people, especially children, receiving soaps and know that they value them so much as somebody has gone out of the way to help them.
“Housekeepers working in hotels come from different countries, some being refugees and displaced persons. When they pick up the discarded soap cakes from guest rooms, they are amazed that this will reach some of their countries. It is touched by loving hands all along the way, right from the housekeepers to the volunteers.
“It appeals to a broad segment of people, right from the recycling aspect to the idea of saving lives and public health. GSP has heightened awareness in hospitality and travel industry. This is an opportunity and it resonates all over thereby giving everyone a chance to work for the others.”
Sarah Kayongo has worked for the past 15 years with international humanitarian development agencies such as Care International and World Vision. Presently, she is the regional development officer of Child Fund International, USA.
Sarah, who met Derreck at Daystar University while pursuing her degree in business administration, says, “What attracted me to Derreck beyond the physical beauty, charm and wit was the fact that we both shared the same vision about our future which is simply: we wanted to use our talents, experience and skills to do something good for our people, especially those in Africa who live in abject poverty. Through our careers in international development and now with the Global Soap Project we are doing just that.
“From the moment Derreck shared the idea with me I knew it would work. With Global Soap Project, Derreck was aware that it was not going to be easy. It took years to get to this point. His persistence and patience made this happen. My job is to support him. Unfortunately, due to my busy work schedule I haven’t accompanied any soap shipment, but I plan to do so in the near future. Derreck has done most of this.”
Sam Stephens, executive director, is the founder head of the International Centre for Sustainable Fundraising, Atlanta. He joined GSP this February.
“We now have almost a thousand hotels participating and we will soon be exceeding that number. Hilton Worldwide is encouraging all of their hotels to participate in our programme. In addition, they have committed $1.3 million [Dh4.8 million], spread out over three years, to help fund a portion of our operations. We’re working to establish an affiliate in Rome. Hotels interested in participating in our programme can get in touch with us.”
Mythily Ramachandran is a writer based in Chennai, India.
