Ludwick Marishane: A bath without water

Translator: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Morton Bast

So I grew up in Limpopo, on the border of Limpopo

and Mpumalanga, a little town called Motetema.

Water and electricity supply are as unpredictable

as the weather, and growing up in these tough situations,

at the age of 17, I was relaxing with a couple of friends

of mine in winter, and we were sunbathing.

The Limpopo sun gets really hot in winter.

So as we were sunbathing, my best friend next to me says,

"Man, why doesn't somebody invent something that you can

just put on your skin and then you don't have to bathe?"

And I sat, and I was like, "Man, I would buy that, eh?"

So I went home, and I did a little research,

and I found some very shocking statistics.

Over 2.5 billion people in the world today

do not have proper access to water and sanitation.

Four hundred and fifty million of them are in Africa,

and five million of them are in South Africa.

Various diseases thrive in this environment,

the most drastic of which is called trachoma.

Trachoma is an infection of the eye due to dirt

getting into your eye. Multiple infections of trachoma

can leave you permanently blind.

The disease leaves eight million people permanently blind

each and every year. The shocking part about it

is that to avoid being infected with trachoma,

all you have to do is wash your face:

no medicine, no pills, no injections.

So after seeing these shocking statistics, I thought to myself,

"Okay, even if I'm not just doing it for myself

and the fact that I don't want to bathe, I at least need

to do it to try to save the world." (Laughter)

So with my trusty little steed, my Nokia 6234 cell phone --

I didn't have a laptop, I didn't have Internet much,

except for the 20-rand-an-hour Internet cafe —

I did research on Wikipedia, on Google, about lotions,

creams, the compositions, the melting points, the toxicities --

I did high school science --

and I wrote down a little formula on a piece of paper,

and it looked like the KFC special spice, you know?

So I was like, okay, so we've got the formula ready.

Now we need to get this thing into practice.

Fast forward four years later, after having written

a 40-page business plan on the cell phone,

having written my patent on the cell phone,

I'm the youngest patent-holder in the country,

and — ("No more bathing!") —

I can't say any more than that. (Laughter)

I had invented DryBath, the world's first

bath-substituting lotion.

You literally put it on your skin, and you don't have to bathe.

(Laughter)

So after having tried to make it work in high school

with the limited resources I had, I went to university,

met a few people, got it into practice,

and we have a fully functioning product that's ready

to go to the market. It's actually available on the market.

So we learned a few lessons in commercializing

and making DryBath available.

One of the things we learned was that poor communities

don't buy products in bulk.

They buy products on demand. A person in Alex

doesn't buy a box of cigarettes. They buy one cigarette

each day, even though it's more expensive.

So we packaged DryBath in these innovative little sachets.

You just snap them in half, and you squeeze it out.

And the cool part is, one sachet substitutes one bath

for five rand.

After creating that model, we also learned a lot

in terms of implementing the product.

We realized that even rich kids from the suburbs

really want DryBath. (Laughter)

At least once a week.

Anyway, we realized that we could save 80 million liters

of water on average each time they skipped a bath,

and also we would save two hours a day for kids

who are in rural areas, two hours more for school,

two hours more for homework,

two hours more to just be a kid.

After seeing that global impact, we narrowed it down

to our key value proposition,

which was cleanliness and convenience.

DryBath is a rich man's convenience

and a poor man's lifesaver.

Having put the product into practice, we are actually now

on the verge of selling the product

onto a multinational to take it to the retail market,

and one question I have for the audience today is,

on the gravel roads of Limpopo,

with an allowance of 50 rand a week,

I came up with a way for the world not to bathe.

What's stopping you? (Applause)

I'm not done yet. I'm not done yet.

And another key thing that I learned a lot

throughout this whole process,

last year Google named me as one of the brightest young minds in the world.

I'm also currently the best student entrepreneur

in the world, the first African to get that accolade,

and one thing that really puzzles me is, I did all of this

just because I didn't want to bathe. Thank you.

(Applause.)