Martin Fisher

CEO & Co-Founder, KickStart International

San Francisco, CA, United States

Martin Fisher is the co-founder and CEO of KickStart International. The son of a physics professor, Martin was born in London and grew up in New York in the US. He studied engineering at Cornell University and after an MSc and PhD at Stanford University he took a year off to go to Kenya on a Fulbright Fellowship to study the impacts of appropriate technologies on poverty. He stayed for 17 years. He joined ActionAid where he established a large rural water program, promoted animal traction and built dozens of primary schools. He later led the installation of ~100,000 pit latrines in refugee camps.

In 1991, Martin co-founded ApproTEC (which became KickStart) a non-profit social enterprise with a mission to enable millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa to earn a lot more money and climb out of poverty. As a pioneer in proving how simple business models and technologies can be used to fight poverty, Martin has designed and promoted multiple ‘money-making’ tools for small-scale enterprises including a soil-block press that has been used to build almost a million low-cost rooms.

Since 2000, KickStart has widely promoted small-scale irrigation, putting >425,000 of their unique pumps into the hands of farming families to transition from rain-fed to irrigated farming. These pumps have helped more than 1.6 million people take a major step out of poverty, and generated a total of more than $1.6 billion in new annual profits and wages as of 2025. KickStart has 17 priority countries across sub-Saharan Africa, working through private-sector supply chains and with hundreds of development agencies to reach and educate farmers and advocate for system changes to promote irrigation.

Among numerous awards, Martin and KickStart have been named Skoll and Schwab Social Entrepreneurs, Time Magazine European Heroes, and Stanford Engineering Heroes. Martin has spoken at multiple international and academic venues, including the Skoll World Forum, Global Citizen, AidEx, the CGI Annual Meeting, the Africa Food Systems Forum, the Water for Food Global Conference, the World Water Forum, and Stanford and Yale universities. In his spare time, he is an avid hiker, biker, and explorer.