It’s not been easy but Desert Rose have finally been granted an investment license to make and sell “stuff”.

Water filters to start with.

For a few years now we have been providing consultancy services in which we get to be a one tiny piece of other organisations’ desires to innovate and design in a more human-centric way. Call it “Design Empathy” (we do).

Along the way we’ve learned a lot about the cool stuff that happens when designers and innovators surrender their own ideas and preconceptions about what users should desire and instead designing for what they actually want.

By reinvesting profits back into Ethiopia we also get to reinvest some of the transformational thinking on product design into actual …. well ….products.

This time we’ll hopefully get to see it all the way through to an empathically-designed water filter for sale at the base of the pyramid.

Special thanks to Mahbuub who doesn’t take “no” for an answer!! We love you for it.