14th June 2023
Why community owned free water costs so much
Every year nearly two million children die because they can’t access clean water, but their parents all have mobile phones that work. Technology has advanced whilst water provision has not. Something has gone catastrophically wrong with the approach to delivering clean water in Africa. CSR departments of major corporations and government donors keep doing the same thing hoping for a different result. It was Einstein who said: ”Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”. So why is the approach to water so insane?
Every day, we find ourselves tripping up over well-meaning but poorly-executed programs trying to do water ‘the usual way’. But this comes at a huge cost. Only this week we were in discussion with a major multinational corporation wanting to install new ‘grassroots’ water systems. After showing them hard evidence of failing community-managed water systems, their reply was “if local communities don’t manage daily operations themselves …they will get no knowledge and will lose opportunities to become self-reliant. Our way is to teach how to fish instead of giving fish”. Even faced with our live data showing broken systems run into the ground by NGO/ community-run projects they insist on sticking to their model. The frustration is that even with a water project engineer from Kenya and a consultant from Ghana on the call, when they were asked their opinion their reply was “the eWATERservices way seems very good; sometimes the community struggles to run the system and this could work.” But clearly their opinions didn’t matter either. This is a dangerous top-down naive narrative, driven by vested NGO interests and funded by donors that should, by now, know better. It urgently needs disrupting and that’s what eWATERservices is doing.
Four years ago in a village in The Gambia, eWATER installed four Smart Taps, drilled a borehole connected to a 50,000 litre tank and put in solar panels to power the pump. Thousands of litres of water were being dispensed every week to 1,000 people and then one day those people stopped collecting from the Smart Taps. Noticing this on our live data dashboard, the eWATER Technician went out to investigate why usage had fallen to only a couple of litres per day. She met with the village water committee who revealed that they had allowed a multilateral donor to install free water taps a couple of hundred metres from our Smart Taps. They’d also drilled a new borehole at huge expense even though the eWATER borehole was working just a stone’s throw away. They had then fallen into the old trap of handing the system over to the community to maintain.
eWATER water costs less than $10 per person per year in exchange for 24/7 access to safe drinking water with all repairs and maintenance included. Everyone recognizes this is good value. However, when an NGO or donor-funded project comes to a village, the natural instinct is to take the offer of free water: let’s be honest, who wouldn’t accept free water? So instead of paying a tiny amount at the eWATER Smart Tap with the understanding that their payment guarantees 24/7 water for at least 10 years they agree with the NGO to ‘manage the free system’. When we told the water committee eWATER would have to move our Smart Taps to a different village nearby that desperately wanted our service, they pleaded with us to stay. The Head Man said: “We know this free system will break down, and then we won’t be able to pay for it or sort out the repairs, so please keep the Smart Taps here”.
It’s a tough call to make but when a project becomes unsupportable you have to move resources to where they are genuinely needed. This is what we did in late 2022. In April 2023, just five months later, we received an email from a member of the Village Development Committee who said they were without water; the new pump had already broken and the community had been told by the donor that because it was their ‘community-owned’ system it was their responsibility to organise and pay for the repairs. The community didn’t know where to start, so called a technician, who refused to travel two hours upriver unless the money was paid up front. The Village Committee couldn’t collect the money from their community for the call out, let alone pay for the actual repairs, which they couldn’t do themselves. This is the reality of these schemes that ‘handover to the community’: in effect abandoning the village to sort themselves out when things go wrong – they are not being taught how to fish, they are simply being left to drown.
The reality playing out in thousands of villages across sub-Saharan Africa is that when the water service is free it is not valued, and it isn’t sustainable. Getting clean water piped from the ground, or nearby rivers costs money every single day, and the professional management of that process also costs money. Despite this, some readers will still say “if the community can’t run it, then why not get people in Europe, Asia or the USA to buy the clean water?”. But work it out; that is 500 million people with a minimum spend of $10 dollars. That’s $5 billion a year to be transferred transparently to each village water system to pay for small things like new batteries and pipes. Who will oversee the payments and organise the everyday operations and maintenance now, or in 2030 and 2040? How transparent and accountable could this really be, or would it just create a big financial flow of micro-payments ripe for corruption and inefficiency? Mobile phone companies don’t ask wealthier nations or charities to pay for air time or new phones, and yet most households in Africa subscribe very ably and willingly.
So this is our message to donors, NGO’s and well-meaning funders: installing free, ‘community-managed/ owned’ water services does more harm than good. A cursory search of current donor grant programmes, offering millions of dollars of aid, shows that 90% of them are based on the outdated ‘community-owned/managed’ model. Why isn’t there a growth mindset to learn from past mistakes? ‘Sustainable’ really means locally paid for but professionally serviced. So yes, eWATER charges customers an affordable rate for water. And we don’t hide this fact because any organisation that refuses to discuss professional management, real money, and the technical reality of daily maintenance, is weaving a fantasy which is leaving people without water and holding back the development of nations.