Rocky soil that the Tute Kunche pipeline passes through.

At that point we encountered a split in the trench. One branch went to the northern half of the community. The other veered south. We turned south and continued walking. Finally we approached a group of about a dozen men digging with their basic tools. As we got closer, I noticed there was a second work party just beyond them. When I reached the second work party, I was at the crest of a little hill. I looked over the hill and my skin started tingling. Stretching out as far as the eye could see was a series of work groups digging away at the pipeline trench, singing work songs to help maintain their pace and rhythm. We estimated that 200-300 men were stretched out along a thin line of disturbed earth about a quarter of a mile in length. They were making some serious progress toward their target of 7 miles of trench. When we talked to the water committee later in the day, they said a similar sized group was working on the north branch of the trench at the same time. It was an inspiring sight.

The first work group we encountered digging a section of the 7 miles of pipeline trench.

The long line of Tute Kunche community members working together on the pipeline trench.

Communities always tell us that they need a water project and that it is their highest priority. I occasionally wonder how one would test whether the water project really is the highest priority. When 10 – 20% of the entire community volunteers to join the work party to dig the pipeline trench, that’s pretty convincing evidence. The water committee explained how the work parties are organized. In these rural communities, there are a lot of projects that rely on volunteer labor. The community is divided into 12 areas. Each area has a work crew leader. When a work crew leader receives an assignment, he assembles a crew, which is generally composed of one person from each household in his area. The Tute Kunche Water Committee reported that 3 or 4 people from each household were volunteering for work days for the water project. And households who couldn’t join the work party gladly paid the traditional “fine” of 20 Birr (about $1.15) to the work crew. Rather than distributing the money amongst the people who do show up to work, as is the custom, the crews set aside the money to buy better tools to make the digging go faster. Tute Kunche hoped to finish seven miles of trench digging by the end of the month. Based on what we saw, they have a good chance of meeting their goal.

I don’t have the expertise in engineering necessary for this work, but my experience working with families provides a lens for me to bear witness to deep community roots now nourished by clean water. Village leaders meet with us and describe how they are elected and make decisions about this shared resource. They’ve already forgotten the incredibly hard work it took to complete the project. Instead, they describe new confidence as a result of training, and belief in their future plans based on their success. These experiences are the roots of hope–the same kind of experiences I see in my elementary school. This is the connection for me, my travel reminds me how fundamental those roots are for people anywhere. Even in the toughest circumstances, we all seek ways to protect and fulfill the hopes and dreams of our families.

Girls from the village of Bishikiltu enjoying some time in front of the camera while collecting water.

Women of Gonbisa Kussaye gathering water from a stream.

Karen carrying water with the women of Gonbisa Kussaye

Chris with our drivers, Teklay and Belay. Ethiopians might be the most friendly and hospitable people on the planet.

The first failed water project I ever saw in Honduras, circa 1990.

On my first trip to Honduras in the early 1990s, I visited the municipality of La Virtud in southern Lempira and learned a very good lesson:  implementing a water project that will last is not easy. The water project I was visiting suffered the same fate as an estimated 50% of water systems in poor countries: it had stopped working after a few years and no one had repaired it.

The failure of the La Virtud water project meant that the women and girls it served had returned to the drudgery of carrying water from distant, contaminated sources; some girls had to drop out of school because they were carrying water; many people – mostly children who are more vulnerable – were getting sick from the water; and some families reported that their children had died. But I think perhaps the worst part of this failure was the palpable feeling that the people of La Virtud had completely lost hope that their quest for clean, convenient water supplies might not ever end.

There are many reasons that water projects fail, and none of them are that organizations who implement projects are not well-intentioned. The main reason projects fail is because communities have not or cannot assume responsibility for maintenance and repairs. At Water 1st, we believe the underlying reason for this failure is that organizations that implement water projects are not investing in their own learning. While there is little information out there on how many organizations visit their projects after the ribbon-cutting ceremonies, expert opinion is that less than 5% of projects are visited post-construction and less than 1% receive any long-term monitoring.

Investing in your own learning is much more complicated than placing GPS coordinates of your project sites on a map. It means that organizations are conducting purposeful inquiries into the long-term functioning of their projects to improve the execution of future projects, take corrective actions to improve existing projects, and build a knowledge base of experience.

Given the huge project failure rate and the lack of long-term monitoring that is the status quo for the water sector, we asked ourselves if there was anything we could at Water 1st do to create incentive for all organizations to make long-term monitoring and evaluation a priority. Our answer was the creation of the Water and Sanitation Accountability Forum.

The Accountability Forum is an organization that provides independent audits of long-term functionality in water and sanitation projects. We already know how powerful independent information about charities can be for donors and the organizations they support. In less than 10 years, the majority of nonprofit organizations in the United States have revised how much funding they devote to overhead expenses (or they way they record their overhead expenses) based on financial ratings and information provided by organizations like Guidestar and Charity Navigator.

Funding for COCEPRADIL is highly recommended by the Accountability Forum's independent evaluators because of their success at implementing successful projects that last.

The first Water and Sanitation Accountability Forum was held in December 2011 to evaluate Water 1st’s Honduran partner organization, COCEPRADIL, that has been implementing water and sanitation programs for over 20 years. We felt the best way to demonstrate our belief in this idea was to subject ourselves to an independent audit.

Although long-term functionality of water and sanitation projects has been a concern for decades, there is no universally-accepted definition of what it means. (In fact, I was at another water sector meeting on sustainability over a year ago, and when participants were casually asked to define the length of time that a water project should operate for their organization to feel a project was successful, the answers ranged from 2-3 years to forever.)  Thus, the first step in the creation of the Forum was for us to work with peer organizations to develop a set of standards to evaluate long-term water and sanitation project outcomes.

These shy girls of San Andrecito have never known what life is like without clean, convenient water because of the water system their parents built and maintained for the past 20 years!

Over one week in December 2011, two independent evaluators and ten peer organizations evaluated our Honduras partner, COCEPRADIL, based on 22 criteria of likelihood of long-term service provision. The results were outstanding. The independent evaluators concluded that COCEPRADIL has shown exceptional work in an extremely challenging sector. As one Forum participant expressed, they are “la joya en la corona” (the jewel in the crown) and provide a positive example of program implementation. Based on the criteria used in the Accountability Forum, they met all basic expectations for sustainability in 21 of 22 categories and met exceptional expectations in 11. Extreme threats to sustainability were not identified in any category.

Part of the independent evaluation involved field visits to randomly selected water projects. Two-hundred community names were placed in a cowboy hat and coincidentally, all projects selected had been built quite a long time ago – from 17-21 years old. Incredibly (and certainly notable in a field where up to 50% of projects fail within 2-5 years after implementation) all systems evaluated were still functioning and being used. Local water boards are in place and in all communities we visited, households were paying monthly tariffs and boards had positive bank accounts that had increased over the past two years. The communities’ sense of system ownership is very high: we were told by one water board “we are all engineers and plumbers here,” and they were very confident in their ability to find spare parts and fix breakdowns. COCEPRADIL staff attribute their success to extensive training with communities upfront, during and post-implementation.

Because of training provided by our Honduran partner, COCEPRADIL, the water committee (above) of San Antonio has successfully maintained their water system for 20 years, including collecting fees from every household to pay for system repairs.

The pilot Forum exceeded our expectations both in terms of interest and participation from other organizations, as well as the ground work that was laid for future Forums, through developing a protocol to translate evaluation results to a simple metric for donors who are seeking information on organizations working in the water and sanitation sector. We hope to focus our 2012 work on strengthening these protocols as well as developing a model for long-term sustainability of the Forum.

About $10 billion is spent annually on water and sanitation projects. If half of these projects are failing, the potential of the Accountability Forum is enormous in terms of steering donations to the best programs, and also incentivizing organizations to improve their performance.

At Water 1st, we can imagine a world where everyone holds themselves accountable to project implementation, and water and sanitation projects provide permanent solutions. Most importantly, we can imagine a world where no one has to suffer the loss of trust and hope that accompany a failed project.

School kids from Bishikiltu enjoying access to clean water at home and at school.

School kids excited to show school principal, Karen Nilson their English

Ethiopia field visit day 2- Day two of our field visit was spent in the community of Gonbisa Kussaye where our arrival was met with singing, chanting and dancing! After initial celebrations came to an end, we moved down the steep banks of the river to see where the women and young girls of the community collect their water. I have to say, I have seen it in videos and pictures but to see it in person, up close,  squatting down next to the women as they try and brush the filthy scum off the top of the water to fill up their water cans made this issue so undeniably real for me. This disgusting dirty water is what they drink, it is what they cook with and what they bathe in; it is all they have. It is great to see people with access to clean water but it is hard to understand just how amazing it really is until you have witnessed the horrible conditions they were faced with before. To say I was moved in an understatement.

Women from Gonbisa Kussaye community filling up their water cans with dirty river water.

I too filled up my water can with help from one of the women and then began the steep trek up the banks to her home. The walk was not easy. Once you have negotiated the steep river banks (they are too steep for even donkeys to get down) the incline up to the homes is steady and long. Luckily for me, the woman’s house was one of the first and I was able to take off my heavy load after only a kilometer. Most women walk much further and make the trip multiple times a day.

Making the trek up the from the river to the women's homes with a full container (about 50 pounds) of water on my back.

After carrying water we met with the water committee. We were encouraged to see that the committee consisted of a 4 to 3 ratio of women to men. I was even more impressed to hear one of the men explain that this was done intentionally because they understand the burden of fetching water is felt most heavily by the women. They know that it is important that the women’s voices are heard. One of the hardest parts of this meeting was realizing that these people are still skeptical and unsure whether this project is going to happen. One woman in the meeting even offered up her cattle, undoubtedly the majority of her net worth,  if it would help ensure the project was completed. It was a very bittersweet feeling, knowing how badly these people want this project  and how many times they have been let down while also feeling happy that they will soon know that the project is in fact a reality.

One of the first communities Water 1st ever visited in Ethiopia was Bishikiltu. Scenes of women gathering water from Mara River appeared in our first films. Few images do a better job of communicating the global water crisis than pictures of women and girls filling containers with the brown Mara River water and carrying them the 5 kilometers home.

When we visited Bishikiltu in Feb 2012 to see how their 2-year old project was operating, we dropped in on a public water point at 4 pm, the start of the afternoon hours of operation. A number of women came to the water point to fill 5 gallon containers in the 20 minutes we were there. One of those women was Tagetu. We asked her where she lived. She said she lived just 2 minutes from the water point. We asked her where she collected water before the water point was completed. She said the Mara River. It used to take her 3 hours to collect water and the water she was collecting was a major health hazard to her family members.

Tagetu expressed her enormous relief and gratitude for the Bishikiltu project, which we want to share with you – the Water 1st community. Your support made this project possible as well as the Ilamu Muja project and the Kelecho Gerbi project. Together, those three projects are bringing safe water to 11,800 people in rural Ethiopia. And two additional projects serving 4,500 people are underway. Your efforts are transforming an entire woreda – the Ethiopian equivalent of a county or a township. It’s amazing the impact we can have when we pool our resources and direct them to a well-conceived, well-implemented project.

Bishikiltu water point in operation

Gathering water at the Mara River (2006)

Tagetu and her daughter, Burtucal, filling their water container at a tap just 2 minutes from home - a world of difference from her life just 2 years ago!

Our partner organization in Bangladesh is Dushtha Shasthya Kendra (DSK), a highly professional and competent organization. With the funding they receive from Water 1st each year, they staff four project offices, Pallabi, Kamrangirchar, Demra, and Halishahar-Bander. Each year we visit each office to see completed projects, both old and new.

On the day we visited the Pallabi office earlier this month, we did all the usual activities. We saw a completed school water and toilet project. We visited a minority community that had no water access and now has four water systems and toilet blocks. We saw a few older projects and noted they were still serving the beneficiaries well.

We returned to the office for our usual debrief. One special activity on the agenda was to give the office a calendar that a church group from Olympia, Washington had sent them. The calendar had photos of families at the church. It was intended to strengthen the personal connection they hoped to establish with the Pallabi office staff. The church group decided in 2010 to adopt one of the project offices in Bangladesh in addition to contributing funding. They sent a photo of their missions committee with us in 2010 to give to the Pallabi staff with the message that this group of people from the United States was thinking about them every day, thanking them for doing this important work, and praying for their success in meeting the most basic needs of the poorest in their community. I was happy to see the photo from 2010 was prominently displayed when we walked in the office. That suggested that they would like the calendar we were about to give them.

After presenting them with the calendar, we had our usual meeting, in which we asked questions about their year and presented our findings and observations from the visit. The whole staff cheered when they heard that we thought they were doing excellent work.

Then we asked them if they had anything they wanted to share with us, ask us, recommend to us.Taslima, the office manager, quickly took the floor and began to speak quite passionately. As I waited for the translation, my mind drifted a bit, speculating on the topic she was covering. Was she expressing concern about inflation that was impacting her employees? Was she concerned about the challenge of finding high quality building materials? Was she responding to our comments about all the things they have done in the past couple years to improve construction standards?

She completed her thoughts and our translator turned to us to let us in on what she had said. “This is interesting,” he said. “She has pointed to the picture that you brought to them last year. And she said that it is an honor for them to have this photo. When they get a photo from people very far away, they feel very good. It inspires them and they even go home and tell their families about it. It feels good to let their families know that they are working on a project that people from the other side of the globe believe to be very important. Taslima tells everyone in the office to respect this photo and to take good care of it.” Our translator then said, “Taslima has said all of this much more eloquently than I have translated it. I am sorry that I couldn’t adequately capture the words she spoke.”

Wow! I was blown away. As professional and competent as DSK are, the greatest motivation for Taslima and her staff is the knowledge that people care about what they are doing each day in the slums.The fact that a few people had taken the time to send them a photo brought that concept alive for the Pallabi office day in and day out. It’s a great example of the importance of human connections. I suddenly wished I had 10 groups who would be willing to adopt an office in Bangladesh or Honduras orEthiopia.

The success of each Water 1st project hinges on dozens of people who go out each day into the poorest communities, taking on some of the most challenging work imaginable. They receive very little acknowledgment of their efforts. They earn modest salaries. When we visit our projects, we always make a point of affirming our partners, for like most people, they appreciate hearing that they’re doing a great job and what they are doing is significant. It’s one of the many reasons that monitoring visits are critical in this work. But when a word of encouragement comes directly from you, our donors, there is a little extra sweetness to the message.

Presenting Taslima and the Pallabi office with 'the original photo' in 2010.

The photo of the Grace Church group that adopted the Pallabi Office.

One of the great projects completed by the Pallabi office in 2011. This water point serves a minority community that had major water challenges prior to DSK's involvement.

Taslima and staff share with Water 1st about the significance of the relationship with the Grace Church group.

Kamrangirchar field office staff showing Water 1st staff their work. Through six years of hard work, the staff have earned the trust of the community, enabling them to encourage changes in behaviors that many consider very personal and private (like personal hygiene and use of toilets).

By Kirk Anderson, Water 1st staff

My first visit to Kamrangirchar took place in February 2008. Water 1st had just completed two years of funding water projects in that large slum area. Our partner organization, DSK, was really just scratching the surface with its program of providing water supply, toilets, and hygiene education. Water 1st was still young and the project budget was not particularly significant at the time. Changes were very localized. Here and there, a small group of families had a new well and a toilet. But overall, it was clearly a slum. After a week of trudging around in the slums of Dhaka, I debated whether or not to bring home my field shoes. Conditions were rough.

Three and a half years later, I have just returned from our latest site visit to Bangladesh. I had great experiences everywhere I went, but my distinct impression in Kamrangirchar was that this whole community had been transformed. When visiting compounds with a DSK-built water point, I frequently saw a new water system in the compound next door. During one of my interviews, I asked about the neighboring water point. When was it built? How deep was it drilled? What I learned was that the neighbors came over and learned all about the new DSK system and then hired someone to build a similar one. It was clear that DSK’s influence and impact reached beyond just the projects that they had directly implemented.

The other big change we noticed was how clean the slum area is now. Cities like Dhaka, Bangladesh, are generally pretty grungy. Municipal budgets for keeping streets and sidewalks free of debris do not even scratch the surface. Even wealthy areas are full of litter. So what I experienced in Kamrangirchar, one of the city’s poor slums, was astounding. The roadways and walkways were clean and pleasant! Several community groups that were organized by DSK to coordinate water and toilet projects had expanded their activities into solid waste collection. Any family in the area who wanted their household garbage collected could pay about 60 cents per month. The funds were used to pay the crew to collect the trash and dump it in a government sanctioned area. DSK provided a bicycle-powered cart to collect the garbage. Prior to establishment of this system, residents had no option other than to toss their waste into the street and gutters.

Other sections of the slum were aware of the system their neighbors had devised and were asking DSK for assistance in organizing their own solid waste collection cooperative and getting a “garbage truck” to make the system work. The change was dramatic. Kamrangirchar had become one of the cleanest areas of the city. From oppressive slum to a livable community. It’s the whole point of this work – to provide the world’s poorest with the resources and technical assistance they need to meet their basic needs and restore their dignity.

That’s a difficult transition to bring about. It can only be done through an effective local partner applying consistent effort over a sustained period of time (in this case 5 years). Thank you to all Water 1st supporters who have provided the consistent funding to make it all happen. And if you are interested in seeing this incredible work for yourself, let us know. We’d love to show you what a difference your investment in the world’s poorest has made!

Map of project areas covered in the Kamrangirchar slum area. In 2006 and 2007, the project only affected the pink and red areas. By 2011, DSK was working throughout the entire island (pink, red, and blue areas).

Shelina Begum shows us her new water system, one of 48 completed in Kamrangirchar in 2011. DSK has completed 186 water systems and 159 community toilets in the slum since 2006.

Local community leader explaining how their solid waste collection system operates. An example of how the community organization element of the project leads to other improvements in the beneficiaries' lives.

The local Garbage Truck with crew. DSK provided the community with this collection vehicle. Households pay a monthly fee for trash service. The fees pay the wages of the trash crew.

1 of 5 new water points in Haji Camp.

Haji Camp residents in 2010.

By Kirk Anderson, Water 1st staff

What is the best measure of success in the business of bringing clean water to the world’s poorest? I think Meselech Seyoum (a founding member of our partner organization in Ethiopia) said it best: “In these poor communities, the struggle to survive is so difficult that there is not much laughter in the family. When you complete a water project, you relieve these families of a very big burden. And they have the energy to laugh again. I think every family deserves that.” It shouldn’t be the only measure, but I think it is important to pay attention to smiles and laughs. One place that we found smiles and laughter on our recent Asia trip was a place called Haji Camp a slum area in Chittagong, Bangladesh. Earlier this year, our partner organization, DSK, succeeded in finding a suitable water source for them and we were there to see it in operation.

Less than one year ago, I stood in the middle of Haji Camp. It was clearly one of the poorest areas of a poor country. We were there to inspect a couple community toilets that had been completed in 2010 for a group of shoemakers who were concentrated in a small area in the center of the slum. The toilets were a great addition to their lives, but while I was speaking to them, I didn’t see much happiness in their faces. Once we concluded our discussion about the toilets, a couple of women said to me:

“We appreciate the toilets, but we would really like to have a well. Our biggest challenge is finding water. There is a public water point a few hundred yards away, but the line there is very long. If we try to place our water containers in that line, the people who live closer to that water point get rough with us. So now we have to wait until night to go out searching for water for our families.”

DSK, our partner organization, was working on a solution to their water problem, but hadn’t found the right approach, yet. DSK feels it is better to spend a year developing a comprehensive solution that will meet needs for decades, versus taking a quick action that merely reduces the severity of the issue. So my biggest hope for 2011 was to return to that enclave of families to find their water supply issues resolved. I was not disappointed. DSK had identified a local landowner who was interested in constructing a well and installing a large capacity submersible pump that could serve hundreds of people. Neighboring landowners entered into an agreement with him to establish water distribution points for the people living on their property. One group of beneficiaries was the group of families I had met the year before. They were able to collect water from a set of four taps that were shared by about 400 people and in operation when the pump was running. They also had a storage tank in their compound with two taps that they could access when the other taps weren’t running. Their lives had changed dramatically and it showed in their faces. The stress lines gave way to smiles.

Our thanks to DSK for finding creative, effective solutions to difficult problems. And our thanks to the Water 1st community for supporting this work. Our strategy of funding local partners who work over an extended period of time in a specific region leads to comprehensive and long-lasting solutions to the challenges faced by the world’s poorest. DSK takes the time to build projects that truly meet people’s needs and place them in a position to work their way out of poverty. Water 1st believes that is the outcome our donors truly seek when they make a contribution. Our monitoring efforts demonstrate that our partners are delivering on that promise. We’re looking forward to reaching 75,000 lives transformed just like the lives of the Haji camp families before the end of 2012.

The long line for water: water containers lined up at the public water point. This is the line that the women were excluded from.

The new water taps located directly in the living space of the Haji camp community, providing round the clock access to clean water.

Zinesh in 2011, describing her job as Purchaser for the Kelecho Gerbi water supply system.

We look forward to visiting with her again in February 2012 to hear how the new system is working for the community. We’ll learn what lessons they have learned in their first six months on the job. Has the community embraced the new hygiene practices and the use of latrines? Are they experiencing better health and how are they using the time they previously spent carrying water? Join us on the 2012 Ethiopia Water Tour (Feb. 4 – 11) to hear Zinesh’s and other community members responses for yourself!

Kelecho Gerbi is the third project Water 1st has supported in Ethiopia. The Ilamu Muja project was completed in 2008 and serves 3,500 beneficiaries. The Bishikiltu project was completed in 2010 and serves 4,243 beneficiaries. Our partner organization, Water Action, is currently working on our fourth project, Tute Kunche, which will serve approximately 3,000 people.

This project funded by another foreign aid organization (not Water 1st) in West Bengal, India was completed in early 2010 and was not working less than 6 months later. Water 1st staff came across it during a site visit to our India partner's projects in December 2010.

Intellectually, most organizations working in the water and sanitation sector understand the need for monitoring and evaluation.  But for many organizations, these activities will not have a high priority until investing in them affects their ability to find funding for their work.  That’s why we are inaugurating the Water and Sanitation Accountability Forum which will provide 3rd party, independent evaluations of organizations implementing water and sanitaiton projects.  We believe in this idea so much that we are jumping in first – our Honduran partner organization will be the first to be evaluated and we will make the evaluation results public.  

The goal of the Accountability Forum is not to “out” bad implementers. It is the opposite - we want to create a sustainability certification system that encourages  strong project implementation, provides an opportunity for implementing organizations to demonstrate that they are delivering on their promises, and also gives donors a tool to differentiate organizations that are doing sustainable work from those that aren’t. 

Read more here on the Global Water Challenge website. 

In Ilamu Muja, Ethiopia, a tap attendant collects payment from a community member after she fills her water vessel. The collected funds are used to pay for the ongoing operations and maintenance of this Water 1st-funded water system which has been functioning well for 3 years. Projects that include fees for users and good record-keeping of fees collected provide a great window into operations. If people are paying fees, it is a good indicator that they are receiving service.