Gayatri Datar was born and raised in the Boston area by Indian parents. “We went back to India nearly every year and I was disturbed by the poverty and suffering I witnessed there,” she says. A semester in college spent doing tsunami relief work led her to conclude that, “there was a lot I could do about it.”

Datar decided to take several semesters off to work with NGOs in developing countries. After earning an undergraduate degree in 2009, she worked for the World Bank and then Dalberg Global Development Advisors, helping social-sector organizations address development issues by integrating private-sector solutions. “I was attracted to the idea of treating people in need of services and solutions as clients,” she says. She came to the Stanford Graduate School of Business to further enhance her understanding of how business could be harnessed to generate positive social outcomes.

The idea for EarthEnable was born out of a class Datar took at Stanford’s d.school called Design for Extreme Affordability. Paired with MASS Design in Rwanda, an architecture firm focusing on optimizing health and sustainability through their designs, her team’s goal was to design a product or a service for low-income Rwandans that would improve health within the home or community. Part of the class entailed traveling to Rwanda on a two-week trip over spring break to utilize the tools learned in the class, such as empathy building, human-centered design, and rapid prototyping. 

“People would constantly mention roofing and flooring as something they would want to change in their home. This issue was especially pronounced as we were visiting in the rainy season, which meant that many of the floors were muddy with puddles, breeding insects,” she says. 

Gayatri returned to Stanford determined to find a solution, and after many iterations (from plastic tiles to waterproof mats), her team discovered earthen flooring. “After seeing how easy it was to make this type of flooring ourselves –– and after realizing that it was a much more sustainable solution than concrete — we knew this needed to be scaled across Rwanda and across the world,” she says. “My hope is that it will take off and spread quickly.”