The Stone Family Foundation

We are very excited to be launching a new £100,000 prize: The Stone Prize for innovation and entrepreneurship in water.

At the Stone Family Foundation, we want to find, reward and support new initiatives in the water sector that are innovative, entrepreneurial and potentially scalable. We hope the Stone Prize will help take promising approaches to the next level of their development.

We are looking for initiatives based in sub-Saharan Africa and South and South-East Asia that are developing sustainable and effective services to get clean drinking water to people who need it. This could be: marketing and selling low-cost household water purification technology, or using mobile phone technology to process water kiosk payments cheaply.

Our prize winners will be able to demonstrate their potential to have an impact—we’re not looking for ideas that exist only on paper or in someone’s head, but ones which have been tested on the ground in some way. The key for us is that winning applications can show that their idea works, and that applicants have the ambition and energy to take the initiative to the next stage.

Some examples of what we are looking for include:

• taking a successful idea out of the laboratory and testing ways to market and deliver it in the field;
• developing ways to successfully market and promote a new technology;
• adapting an existing service to reach the poorest households; or
• transferring a promising model into a different context or country.

The Stone Prize is open to all organisations and individuals that meet our criteria. There may be up to five prizes, and the        winner(s) will receive £100,000 each.

We hope that this prize will do more than simply finding and supporting initiatives with a potentially significant impact on people’s lives.

We want it to encourage people to talk about what innovation and entrepreneurship means in the water sector, and think about pioneering new ways to ensure everyone has access to safe, clean drinking water.