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Living Goods offers products that improve health and wealth and are otherwise difficult to access for too many people in need. Product sales also enable our Community Health Promoters to earn a modest income and for Living Goods to recover 100 percent of the product costs, thus reducing the annual cost of the Living Goods system to less than $2 per person reached.
Living Goods employs a rigorous product selection process using two key criteria:
IMPACT: We only promote products that improve lives and provide a compelling value to the customer. All of our products improve health, save money, and/or save valuable time.
HARD TO ACCESS: We offer items that are difficult to access, meaning they are hard to find, are prohibitively priced, or are low in quality.
Where these two criteria coincide we can make a difference AND earn a reasonable margin to ensure sustainability. Living Goods continually tests new innovative products. Contact us now if you know of any new products that we should test.
A lack of simple micro-nutrients like vitamin A contributes to stunting rates as high as 40 percent in Africa, and is a factor in over half of under-five deaths. To address this issue, Living Goods spent a year creating and refining Healthy Start, a vitamin-fortified maize soya complimentary feeding porridge for kids six to twenty-four months. Healthy Start is now our top-selling product. Encouraged by this success, we are adding a Healthy Start Millet flour and testing a range of pack sizes.
Three easily treatable diseases cause up to 60 percent of child deaths in Africa—malaria, pneumonia, and diarrheal disease. Living Goods trains and equips our health promoters to treat all three of these.
Over three billion people still cook on open fires that hog fuel, emit tons of ozone-depleting black carbon, and contribute to over a million deaths from respiratory infections. Living Goods offers a range of improved, insulated stoves that conserve heat and reduce fuel use by 50 percent or more.
Amazingly in 2015, two out of three families in Sub-Saharan Africa still lack electricity. They waste limited cash on dirty, dangerous kerosene-fueled lamps that are a strain to work or study with. Advances in LED lights and plunging prices for solar panels now make home solar a smart option for under-served families.