3A Blog

Born in the US? Congratulations, you won! Roughly 4.5% of the world population lives in the United States. That means you have a roughly 1 in 22 chance of being born here. Those odds really aren’t that bad. Let’s take minute though to look at the flip side of things. Approximately 15% of the world population lives in Africa. That means  your odds of being born in Africa are 1 in roughly 6.5. Now, let’s take a look at the GDP for the United States and for Africa. USA (2009): 14,002,739,000,000 (14 Trillion) Africa (2009): 1,184,000,000,000 (1.1 Trillion) Let’s do...

Recently, I’ve received a number of questions about our financial model. I’ve also seen some blog posts where people are taking a stab at what it might be. I think that’s absolutely wonderful that people are interested in the model behind Three Avocados. Based upon the interest, I wanted to take a few minutes to write a simple blog post describing the model. Simply put, in many ways, Three Avocados is no different than any other business…well, except that we give away 100% of our profits. The easiest way to think about our model is just that of a regular...

I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Pastor Charles Bameka, who is a Lutheran pastor in Kampala, Uganda, and surrounding villages. Charles himself has an amazing story. He was born and raised in Uganda, very poor. He was able to get an education and get a good paying job. He quit his job to become a pastor. Charles does amazing work all throughout southern Uganda. But, this post is not about Charles. Charles told us the story of a street kid in Jinja, Uganda. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, street kids are typically young, orphaned children. They...

The hotel that I stayed at in Jinja, Uganda, had a business center. The business center consisted of 5 or so PC’s with internet access. For a small fee per minute, you could get online. A few of us would head down there each morning to check our email and send our families a quick note. The first day I was there, I headed down to use the computer. When I was done, I went to pay my fee. The woman running the business center told me my fee was 50 shillings.  That’s about two cents. Since it was our...

Prior to visiting Uganda in January, 2010, I had no idea what the ‘water crisis’ was. I can truthfully say I had never thought about the 1 billion people on this earth without access to clean water. I literally thought that if a village didn’t have indoor plumbing, they headed down to the river and grabbed some water when they needed it. I had no idea the water they got, they often times walked 4 miles for. Or that the water they are getting has the potential to kill them. Or that it’s often little girls going to fetch water....