Meet: Hearing aid social entrepreneur Howard Weinstein, founder of Solar Ear

There is an old African saying that ‘a blessing can be found next to the wound’. And it’s something that has proved especially true for Howard Weinstein, a Canadian in his sixties who has been living in the Brazilian city of Sao Paolo for the last 15 years.

The unimaginable grief of losing his daughter Sarah in Montreal led, by way of multiple nations, to his co-founding Solar Ear with 10 deaf people.

The social entrepreneur makes solar-powered hearing aids for developing countries, with all the makers being themselves deaf.

It now has the approval of UNICEF and the WHO, among other organisations.

To date, the project has raised more than $3m, and the UN previously named it as Global Social Entrepreneur of the Year.

It describes itself as “the largest non-profit hearing aid company in the world”, with distributors in more than 40 countries. The shared wealth structure  means that the deaf people who work for Solar Ear also train others in the social model. There is no patent, deliberately, precisely so that the model can be shared.

Weinstein, who is himself hearing, claims that he himself “cannot even screw in a lightbulb” (never mind assemble a hearing aid). But for him the story began in the mid-1990s when he lost his daughter Sarah when she was just 10 from a brain aneurysm in Montreal, Canada, where he’d previously enjoyed a successful career in management.

A week after the devastating death, he also lost his job as president of a plumbing firm. It led to him becoming an overseas volunteer with his then wife in the Botswanan village of Otse, where he got to know the local disabled community.

Almost immediately after arriving, he met a teenage girl also called Sarah, a deaf school pupil who needed a hearing aid. She even shared the same birthday as his late daughter. Weinstein visited her school, and learned that, within the local culture, deafness and disability were viewed as curses from God. The stigma made employment for those with a hearing loss incredibly difficult. Additionally, batteries for hearing aids were often prohibitively  expensive and the devices themselves frequently unaffordable.

“Often, once the first battery has run out, the hearing aids were simply no longer used,” says Weinstein.

It led to him devising a sustainable business plan, receiving $250,000 in seed funding from the African Development Corporation and establishing a company then called Godisa Technologies, with Sarah and nine other young deaf women. Together with the help of an electronics instructor whom Weinstein hired, they set out to create an alternative hearing aid technology that far more people who needed them would be able to afford.

 

The statistics speak for themselves. Solar Ear says 400 million of the 642 million worldwide who need hearing aids live in developing countries.

But the 10 million aids produced yearly are sufficient to meet the needs of just 1.5% of the planet’s population who need them.

Yet a deaf child who has a hearing aid by the age of three is in a far stronger position to learn speech and attend school.

The key to Solar Ear’s devices is that they are rechargeable. They last up to three years, rather than the weeks or even days of conventional aids, and market for a fraction of the price. The batteries charge up in hours, in a palm-sized solar charger.

What’s more, interestingly, the hand-eye coordination needed for sign language has proven invaluable in having the manual dexterity to handle the delicate parts and operation of putting hearing aids together.

Solar Ear is creating jobs for local deaf people, and is involved in issues such as HIV education for the deaf. It has also campaigned for more hearing aids which match an African skin tone. (Traditionally, aids are beige in colour to suit Caucasian skin.) The organisation has also gone on to win some 30 awards from around the world.

A third of profits are invested back into the business, a third goes on the company’s social mission while the remaining third towards employee empowerment. The social mission includes, for example, peace-building and plans to build a micro-soldering school in Israel for Jewish, Muslim and Christian deaf workers in the Middle East.

In 2006, Weinstein returned briefly to Canada, but found he couldn’t settle. So he decided to move to the Brazilian city of Sao Paolo for the next stage of his life – and here he met his second wife, who is Brazilian, and became a stepfather to two daughters.

In Brazil, Solar Ear was able to develop a new rechargeable digital hearing aid to upgrade the previous analogue version, plus a second-generation solar charger and two new low-cost rechargeable batteries.

But, he says: “It was the deaf workers in Botswana who did it all. They invented and assembled the products. They teach other deaf people to replicate the programme. There are three tiers to what we do – running a sustainable professional business, our social mission and the empowerment of our workers. We try and replicate this scale globally.”

With hearing aids now also made in China as well as Botswana and Brazil, they’re exported worldwide.

Weinstein also says: “We also could be opening in the UK – we’re talking to the NHS and people in London and the north of England, including Doncaster School for the Deaf. We want to carry on growing and creating jobs for and empowering deaf people.”

 Photos courtesy of Solar Ear