Paul Phillips (MBA 2003) is cofounder of Kai-Viti Water, which bottles and sells artesian water from the Fiji Islands. In this interview he talks about the company’s policy of dedicating profits from the company to support basic education needs of children in the islands.

“Ka-Viti is a Fijian term that essentially means proud to be from Fiji. We founded Ka-Viti Water in 2011, built our facility and got all the proper approvals, and then started bringing it into the US a few years after that. Fiji is located in the middle of the South Pacific, 1,500 miles from the nearest continent. It provides an excellent source of pure, natural artesian water.

“From the very inception of Ka-Viti Water, we've been committed to giving back to the people of Fiji. A few years ago when I was in Fiji, we were working with the local schools and had a meeting with essentially the PTA or the board of the schools. We started talking about the kids that actually weren't coming to school. It was something I was totally unaware of.

“We started investigating and talking about why that was. Everyone was required to have a school uniform, and families couldn't often afford that for their children. [Other] children would come to school, but not have lunches with them, so they wouldn't have proper nutrition during school. They were often just embarrassed to come to school. And school supplies––in addition to being required to have a uniform, you were required to bring your own school supplies, some basic books, notebooks, pencils, and that kind of thing.

“So we turned our focus away from being more generally involved in the community to specifically focusing on schoolchildren and trying to solve the problem for the children who just weren't even coming to school. We decided to get our friends and our customers involved by setting up a program where people subscribed monthly to delivery of Ka-Viti Water and, in exchange, we'll use some of those proceeds to help make sure that individual students can go to school and stay in school.

“So basically, people will get home delivery of our product, and we use those funds to provide school uniforms, provide school supplies, provide clean drinking water to the schools, and provide lunch. It was a pretty easy thing to implement. We think [it] has made some significant difference on the children in Fiji and will have a long-term impact on the overall growth of Fiji as a country.”

(Published November 2019)

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