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Philip Gregory Van Kirk

Philip Gregory Van Kirk is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of Community Empowerment Solutions. While working in rural Guatemala in 2003, Greg sought a sustainable means to deliver high-quality, improved cook stoves to rural villagers. Greg recognized there was a need for a new, entrepreneurial solution due to a development and market failure. Greg identified a vacuum between donation and credit-based solutions. This was the genesis of the development of the MicroConsignment Model. Over the next few years, Greg saw that this new model could work for myriad solutions.

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Community Empowerment Solutions
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Model
Hybrid Social Enterprise
Sectors
Gender Inequality; Global Health
Headquarters
Guatemala
Areas of Impact
Latin America, Africa, South Africa, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Guatemala, Nicaragua

Community Empowerment Solutions

Community Empowerment Solutions fills the vacuum between relief solutions and credit-based solutions using its unique MicroConsignment Model (MCM). Through consignment rather than loans, CE Solutions trains, equips, and supports first-time women entrepreneurs to create greater access to vital technologies, products and services at prices affordable to the rural poor in the developing world.

MCM entrepreneurs offer a growing number of appropriate solutions, such as eye glasses, water purifiers and improved cook stoves. They travel to different rural communities for two-day campaigns where they publicize and explain products during the first day and focus on sales during the second day. The MCM is a highly scalable local distribution network of entrepreneurs, and is thus uniquely positioned to provide essential products to rural villagers in their communities.

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