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Why systems grind to a halt after just a few years
The reasons are manifold. The most important ones all boil down to one thing: Funding often flows into a facility as one-off aid, but hardly ever into what happens afterwards. In any long-term enterprise, it would be a matter of course for a portion of the revenue to be reinvested in maintenance and improvement. The question is therefore not how much money is provided, but what happens afterwards.
That is why, with Miombo Water – the first social water supply company of its kind in Zambia – we are demonstrating that things can be done differently. Instead of short-term projects, the company operates distribution networks on behalf of the state-owned water suppliers and finances maintenance through fair tariffs. More on this in the next instalments.
Listening before building
Our approach to social entrepreneurship is not limited to large-scale systems. It extends to small-scale initiatives tailored to the specific local context. Two primary schools in Maputo illustrate this on a small scale.
Following a call for proposals to social institutions across the city, the schools themselves outlined their needs to our local organisation, ÁGUA POR ÁGUA. The joint workshops initially led to the installation of new toilets, taps and refurbished pipework. Maintenance was part of the project from the outset: a team comprising experienced plumbers and young vocational school graduates keeps the new facilities in good working order on an ongoing basis.
With water, the garden thrives – and so does an entrepreneurial cycle
ÁGUA POR ÁGUA worked with the school management teams to develop a plan for how the maintenance team could increasingly be funded from the schools’ own income in future. This led to a discussion about the existing school gardens. They were small because water had to be carried over long distances. With a larger growing area, some of the vegetables could be sold at weekly markets. To this end, our team laid water pipes right up to the gardens.
Today, as a first step, it is easing the strain on the school budget by ensuring that the vegetables supplement the state-subsidised school lunches for over 1,500 pupils, as the funding is not sufficient for everyone. In addition, teachers and pupils take vegetables home, thereby helping their families in what is often a difficult situation. We’re taking it a step further: the schools should gradually be able to finance the upkeep of the water infrastructure from their own income.
‘The school knows better than we do what it needs. And we don’t build anything without considering the necessary maintenance structure right from the start. This applies just as much to our newly founded social water company as it does to a small school garden. It’s also incredibly wonderful to see how proud the teachers are of their garden. So much so that gardening has become an active part of the lessons, much to the pupils’ delight. Things are really taking off at the school.”
– Átila Cézar, Communications & Operations Manager, ÁGUA POR ÁGUA
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