EXPLORE
She’s helping Rwandans
live cleaner by replacing
unsanitary dirt floors.Days after graduating from business
school at Stanford University in 2014,
Gayatri Datar set off for Rwanda to
pursue an unorthodox goal: to rid the
world of dirt floors, which can make
people sick.
“There are bugs all over the place.
Termites. Jiggers. Worms,” she
explains. “Babies don’t have diapers,
so kids poop and pee on the floors.
They’re hard to clean. They don’t look
good. People hate them.” Yet more than
one billion people live on dirt because
they can’t afford anything better.
Datar’s start-up nonprofit, Earth-
Enable, sells an earthen floor made of
locally sourced clay, pebbles, and sand,
sealed with a proprietary eco-friendly
varnish. It costs about $70 per home,
far less than concrete.
EarthEnable struggled at first. Get-
ting raw materials to rural villages
proved costly. Masons had to be trained
to install the floors. Quality was spotty.
Datar, 34, says: “Everything that could
go wrong did go wrong.”
These days EarthEnable is faring
better. More than 4,400 earthen floors
have been installed, Datar reports, and
customers love them. EarthEnable has
raised money from foundations, the
U.S. Agency for International Devel-
opment, and a Dutch competition that
supports green entrepreneurs. Best of
all, Datar is working closely with Rwan-
dan government officials who say they
too want to eliminate dirt floors. jGAYAT R I DATA R
BY MARC GUNTHER PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRIS SCHWAGGAINNOVATORTHIS STORY WAS SUPPORTED BY A GRANT FROM THE PULITZER CENTER ON CRISIS REPORTING.