We seek to gather the plant world's data, decode it into knowledge, and enable action that protects our environment and serves its people.
Our vision: enhancing humanity's knowledge of its environment to improve life on Earth.
Our Nature
True
We gather data accurately, present it faithfully, and build on it with scientific rigour. We are honest and clear, realistic and practical.
Inquisitive
We keep exploring: new ways to gather and use knowledge, new understanding of the environment, and how its own value can help protect it.
Respectful
Of the environment, the people, and the sovereignty of the nations and communities whose heritage this is. We work by consent, and in collaboration.
Adventurous
We think big and move fast. We take on what others will not, at a scale others have not, to bring real change to people and lasting protection to their environment.
Years of building, in the service of Madagascar.
The people behind IsoGentiX have spent more than 25 years creating some of the most effective social enterprises in the country, in clean water, affordable energy, health, and local employment. Between them, initiatives such as BushProof, Medair, JiroVe, MadAvance, SaniTap and Endur'O have reached millions of Malagasy families.
IsoGentiX carries that same purpose into its work, with the same respect for Madagascar's people, its laws and its customs.
The people behind IsoGentiX.
Andrew Tanswell
Co-Founder & CEOLeads strategy, partnerships and governance. An Imperial College engineer who has built impact businesses in the UK and Africa. Andrew and Adriaan have worked together for over 30 years.
Adriaan Mol
Co-Founder & COOLeads Innovation and Operations. Heads up the work in field data collection at scale. Oversees all national operations. Adriaan has lived and worked in Madagascar for over 25 years and has founded several companies with Andrew.
Volatiana Tombotsiory
Relationship & Engagement ManagerLeads the engagement work in Madagascar: consent, and the community and government relationships. Volatiana has worked with Andrew and Adriaan building other social enterprises, including MadAvance and SaniTap.
Photo · SaniTapCommercial, with a conscience.
IsoGentiX is a commercial organisation with a social mission. We use business to draw in the investment, philanthropy and partnership that fund the work. To build on what is known and return the value to the country and its communities.
Real impact on real people at scale.
The founders' work on the ground: clean cooking, clean water, building the capacity of local partners and in collaboration with local government.
Clean cooking
More than 90% of Malagasy households cook on wood or charcoal, which strips the forests and fills homes with smoke. SaniTap and MadAvance distribute improved cookstoves that cut the fuel a household burns and ease the pressure on the forest around it. All 120,000 were distributed within a single year, and the teams are staying with these communities for at least five years to embed the change and make the shift away from wood and charcoal last.
Clean water
Fewer than 36% of rural Malagasy households have safe water close to home, and many existing water points stand broken. SaniTap and MadAvance survey them, repair them and then keep them running, with a 15-year maintenance guarantee and regular water-quality testing.
Clean-water locations map · in development
Every photo is a real person
For every person shown here there are 124 more, also with improved cooking stoves, for their household. The Clean Cooking programme benefitted over 450,000 people. Every stove reduces deforestation, CO2 emissions and the disease that comes from indoor air pollution, for a household of around five people.
Decades of delivery on the ground.
Adriaan Mol founded BushProof, JiroVe, MadAvance, SaniTap, Endur’O and IsoGentiX, and was country director for Medair.
Andrew Tanswell founded SaniTap, MadAvance and IsoGentiX, and was international director of Medair.
It began with Madagascar. It doesn't end there.
We now build the same consolidated, sourced record for other biodiversity-rich nations. Madagascar is the first and the deepest; more floras sit alongside it, from the islands of the Western Indian Ocean to the Pacific, with Ecuador the first step onto the continents, and Sri Lanka joining soon.
* Across all national datasets in the IsoGentiX Flora Portal, updated monthly.