Improvised latrine in Uganda.

Some 4.5 billion people today either do not have a toilet or use one that does not safely manage human waste. Of that total, there are 892 million people who still practice open defecation. This is a big problem. Diseases like cholera are spread through contact with human feces. In fact, the city of Boston created one of the first modern sewage systems in the 1870s after suffering significant deadly outbreaks of cholera. Cities in the U.S. and around the world adopted a similar solution to the problem over the ensuing decades.

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Part 5: Trust

This is all a learning process, but we are not hiding our challenges. Sweeping any failure under the rug simply doesn’t make sense. That cuts out the legs of the shared table where we all sit. The goal is never installation. It is always reliability. Failure is only ever an interim step toward a truly reliable water point.

We could keep this information private, but being open is crucial to ensuring that we are actually living up to our claims. It is the transparency of both successes and challenges through which we discover and create experts at the table willing to contribute to the problem-solving process and to the rest of the water sector.

We’re so thankful for a community of supporters, our donors, who share these same values and are up for the challenge of real impact, over quick solutions. This is one of the values that our supporters bring to the table. They enable all of the above by recognizing and investing in the value of the more cumbersome path of a relationship through partnership.

Trust is crucial to making this work. We truly flourish when supporters trust that the information we are sharing is legitimate and hard-won. Communities trust that we are going to follow up on our promise to ensure that water points will continue to provide safe water, even when they break down.

Building relationships is hard work. We are committed to achieving reliable access to safe water, not just one-off solutions.

We wish there was an easy solution. But it’s messy and requires a lot of candid communication between everyone involved.

We’ve been learning this for 11 years. And we build on this foundation every day.

We know this: without strong relationships, the momentary gains in “people served” will vanish into the graveyard of broken promises and dry wells.

So we depend on one another, the experts, at the table across and beside us, from Kenya, to Concord, to California as the voices who inform and invest in the best water solutions and the systems to ensure they will remain reliable every day.

The Water Project does not build wells. We build relationships. And water flows.

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Part 4: The Table

At The Water Project, we like to imagine that achieving access to safe, reliable water is like a family meeting. Everyone involved has a seat at a large round table — an equal position for all around the meal. At the table sits The Water Project, our local teams, members of the community where projects take place, government officials, donors and other members of the broader water sector. The Water Project is the convener, but there is no head of the table. Rather, it is a community of striving to ensure everyone else at the table can thrive.

Each seat is crucial to achieving the shared goal of ensuring safe, reliable water in the communities. At a table, different voices will arise as experts at different times.

One of the best expressions of the table metaphor is our online project reporting where we tell the story of a reliable water point. Officers from local teams, oftentimes people from the very communities where they are working, conduct surveys and interviews as a part of the process to evaluate potential water points. It ensures a community’s seat at the table is occupied and amplified.

Traditionally, these kinds of reports are one-way communications between an organization and a donor to show their money is spent appropriately. We use the entire reporting process to facilitate the most important conversations at the table and ensure the highest possible return on investment.

The ongoing monitoring of these projects is another crucial layer. Reliable water is a continuing conversation. Projects are visited no less than three times a year by our local teams to check that water still flows and that it is safe to drink.

The local teams are a critical part of the monitoring process; visiting with communities before, during, and after a water point is installed. They are members of these communities. They speak the local languages. They drink from the same water sources.

The status of a project is updated on our website and within each report for everyone to see in near real-time. At any moment in a projects life, anyone can look up the status — including past failures, projects that can not be repaired or projects we no longer can monitor.

This information is shared across all seats at the table, first to The Water Project and then on to our supporters, the communities where we work, and our local experts. Being transparent by reporting on each of our water points is a way to bring more people to the table, adds additional layers of accountability, and fosters interdependence.

Throughout, we learn new ways to ask questions to better understand the reality of impact, to identify issues in need of repair, and to imagine new ways to share reliable, safe water.

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Part 3: Fostering Accountability

Traditionally, accountability and even corrective action for development projects come from the top. This can lead to the wrong solutions or an intervention based on faulty, imported assumptions. We see it all the time in the graveyards of good meaning, in failed water projects within our program areas. Each nonfunctional project a reminder to the community of what is not reliable, and a reminder that the impact of donor funds is buried within that same broken project. Installing another water project isn’t our biggest challenge — ensuring and proving reliability is.

While we were inspired by the potential for economic multipliers in water investment, over our 11 years of experience we’ve seen too many water efforts succumb to neglect, the economics of which are obvious. Communities received water for a short time and then something happened. Sometimes it was something simple, like a broken valve. Other times it was something more complex, like a failure of local ownership. Regardless of the reason, it was neglect and lack of transparent follow-up by otherwise well-meaning organizations that prevented resolution. In the worst cases, they knew about these problems and simply moved on to the next “project”, and then the next.

So we determined to change the math. We staked a claim that we thought to be obvious: for a water project to count as effective, it must work every single day. We have to know water is actually flowing and that information must be public. So, we transformed our work, assembling like-minded groups across the globe to make it happen.

A true partnership is an end-to-end process. It involves input, planning, installation and most importantly on-going evaluation. A collaborative, non-competitive, interdependent relationship leads to truth-seeking, not conflict avoidance. A grant seeker won’t reveal all their faults readily. A partner seeking reliable water does.

By working with communities and constantly monitoring projects, we enable accountability from the proverbial bottom. Doing so catalyzes interdependence. It rotates a traditionally vertical process into one that is horizontal.

Like a table.

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