Our Bureau
Stanford, CA
Stanford alumni Gayatri Datar, MBA ’14, co-founder and CEO of EarthEnable has been honored with this year’s recipients of the President’s Award for Advancement of the Common Good. The award honors alumni who use their talent and education to positively and sustainably change the trajectory of people’s lives. Award recipients exemplify the university’s mission and values, and demonstrate a commitment to learning, social responsibility, and ethical and effective service.
Datar’s journey to helping hundreds of thousands of people obtain affordable, sustainable, and safer housing began with a conversation. Datar was an MBA student spending her spring break in Rwanda as part of the d.school course Design for Extreme Affordability when she met a single mother of three. The woman lived in a home with no windows, dirt floors, and cracking walls, and she told Datar that she wanted to provide a safer environment for her children to have a better future.
The encounter inspired Datar to co-found EarthEnable, a social enterprise that provides people in Africa with healthier homes by training local masons to craft earthen floors, which are made with packed, locally sourced materials like gravel, sand, clay, and fibrous substances before being sealed with a drying oil. These floors are more cost-effective than concrete and also significantly reduce infectious disease, respiratory illness, malnutrition, and vector-borne disease associated with dirt floors, which can harbor pathogens and bacteria. Earthen floors can also be safer in extreme weather conditions.
“If you can fix a shelter problem, you can contribute to health, safety, jobs, and to climate resilience,” Datar said. “Africa needs 400 million more homes in the next 25 years. There’s so much impact and so many dimensions that get unlocked with this one thing.”
Since its founding in 2014, EarthEnable has impacted more than 250,000 lives, created more than 1,000 jobs in East Africa, and completed approximately 45,000 projects.
The d.school’s methodology of prototyping, failing fast, and trying again was invaluable to Datar’s journey. “Having this bias toward action is extremely efficient because you learn quickly,” she said.
The idea for EarthEnable came out of the Extreme course, and Datar received the Social Impact Founder Fellowship from the Graduate School of Business’ Center for Social Innovation to help launch EarthEnable.
“Studying at Stanford absolutely changed my life,” Datar said. “None of this would have happened had I not gone there. There’s just something in the water at Stanford, and the entrepreneurship bug bit.”
Datar is a co-founder of Unlock Impact and co-operator of The Creativity Fund Rwanda, an effort to disrupt the traditional philanthropic model and shift grant decisions to those most impacted by awarded projects. She is also a board member of Water Access Rwanda.
“At the end of the day, I think that every single person on this Earth is here to support other beings to self-actualize, and to do that through love and service,” Datar said. “And that can happen in business, government, NGOs, and social enterprise by providing services to people who need them.”
