Matthew Meyer, Ecosandals.com

Matthew Meyer is a third-year law student at the University of Michigan. In 1995 he cofounded the Wikyo Akala Project, which today sells used-tire sandals around the world at Ecosandals.com.

The office that houses Korogocho's Wikyo Akala Project is hardly adorned with the accoutrements of modern efficiency. The office's lone printer is broken, and has been for weeks. The phone does not work. The nearest photocopier is a quarter of a mile away. The people staffing the office communicate with the workshop (a mile away) by sending a messenger. Electricity is sporadic. In many respects, the office is struggling to function on a basic level, as is the case in so many Nairobi-area businesses.

Yet the Wikyo Akala Project operates a multi-national business, one that in recent weeks has sold sandals made from recycled tire rubber to customers in Sweden, Canada, England, and the U.S. Much of this is thanks to the Internet, which provides a way around the traditional barriers facing organizations with limited resources. There is no way our office could market the Wikyo Akala Project effectively without the Internet. But the seven-year journey to get this far has been meandering, and occasionally tragic.

Four years ago, our mission of selling eco-sandals nearly died along with my friend Benson Wikyo. Wikyo and I worked with Nairobi street children in 1994. When I received a startup grant for the sandal-making project from the Samuel Huntington Fund of Westborough, Mass., Wikyo was the perfect teammate to help me with the business venture. As a young Kenyan volunteer, he was uniquely able to get teams of troubled street youths to work together and think positively. In early 1995, we started the Korogocho Akala Project together. He remained in charge when I returned home to the U.S. later that year. For the following three years, the project struggled to survive. There were a few large orders and many small ones. The project barely provided irregular employment for three Korogocho sandal-makers.

Then, in 1998, I received an email from Benson telling me he was sick. A week later I received a fax that appeared to be the photocopy of a few scribbled words on the back of a chewing gum wrapper. A friend of Benson's had sent a copy of the doctor's certification than he had died. One friend told me it was typhoid. Another claimed it was meningitis. Either way, it was clear that, like so many others Benson and I had worked with in Korogocho, he had died an unnecessary death. Decades-old medical technologies could have saved Benson's life, and countless others. But no one has the money to afford these technologies. Benson didn't either, and so he died -- and with him, I thought, the Korogocho Akala Project would die as well.

But within a month of Benson's funeral, I received a proposal written by his friend Patrick Mukoya. He did not want the project to die. He proposed a small seed grant to restart the project, renaming it the Wikyo Akala Project. Within a few months, the project re-started and developed beaded sandal styles that began to sell. The 2001 launch of Ecosandals.com enabled the project to flourish. Within a month of the launch, the Korogocho sandal-makers were receiving email messages and orders from around the globe. The project quadrupled in size and now employs nine young mothers in addition to 18 young men, providing them with a steady income. All sandal-makers have access to the Internet and will soon be involved in directly marketing the sandals to customers globally. One online customer brought two Korogocho residents to Canada for business training.

The project is slowly emerging as a model of how electronic commerce can benefit communities in the developing world. So often, people in places like Korogocho look far away for their development solutions. The Wikyo Akala Project and Ecosandals.com encourages Korogocho residents to use creativity and look inwards for solutions to local problems. Moreover, we encourage solutions that bring both economic and environmental benefits to the community. Our office produces virtually zero waste and hardly uses any electricity -- although admittedly, less by design than by the realities of a broken printer and a dysfunctional electric company. Yet it is promoting a self-sustaining operation that is gaining momentum with each online order.