The world is facing a water and sanitation crisis, but not the one you think. True, nearly 900 million people lack clean water and 2.5 billion lack a safe toilet, but perhaps the greater tragedy is that decades of efforts by philanthropists and NGOs have been pursued in such a short-sighted way that today many of the poorest regions of the world are littered with broken hand pumps and failed latrines—an enduring reminder of promise unfulfilled. Of the 600,000 to 800,000 hand pumps installed in Sub-Saharan Africa over the past 20 years, approximately one third fail prematurely, according to the International Water and Sanitation Centre in the Netherlands, a total failed investment of more than $1 billion.

Ned Breslin, the CEO of the nonprofit Water For People, caused a stir in January when he published a critique of water and sanitation development practices titled “Rethinking Hydro-Philanthropy.” Breslin argues that donors, NGOs, and local governments are letting down the people they serve by refusing to properly evaluate their work and confront past mistakes.

“Africa, Asia and Latin America have become wastelands for broken water and sanitation infrastructure,” Breslin writes. “Go to schools throughout developing countries and you will often find a broken hand pump around the corner, or a disused latrine that filled years ago. Sector agencies intuitively know this but the general public is shielded from these hard truths as perceptions of failure could threaten ‘the cause’ of reaching the unserved. Poor people do not benefit from this disingenuity.”

The pump pictured above was not maintained by the NGO that installed it nor was a successful plan made for it to be maintained by residents. In order to access water, the residents broke through the top (called the cement apron) and now adults and children alike dangerously hover over the edge to dip in their jugs. Image by Julia Lewis, courtesy of Water for People.

For water and sanitation development projects to have a chance of succeeding, Breslin says, the sector must move from short-term to long-term thinking, from charity work to sustainable development. Local governments must invest their own money in development projects to create a sense of ownership. Philanthropists must form more substantial relationships with development agencies and apply their business expertise when choosing and monitoring the projects. Above all, organizations must honestly evaluate their projects over time.

I interviewed Breslin over e-mail about his ideas and how they are being received in development circles.

How did you decide to write your article?

I lived and worked in Africa for close to 20 years and spent well over half my time there rehabilitating failed water projects and poorly designed sanitation initiatives. People received clean water, celebrations ensued, photos were taken, and then the NGO or volunteer group would return to the U.S. or Europe and never learn that the project they had installed failed. I have a good friend whose child died because, after first tasting clean water when weaned from his mother’s breast, his body could not cope when the water supply broke and the family returned to the polluted source they had hoped was abandoned forever.

So I decided to write this piece because I believe the water and sanitation sector has misdiagnosed the challenge. Yes, there are hundreds of millions, even billions of people who do not have clean water, but this is also because we as a sector have not done particularly well at providing lasting solutions. We constantly see the pictures of women or girls scooping water from a muddy puddle, but what we don’t see is that they often walked past broken hand pumps and taps to get to that puddle. This is not acceptable, and is lost on the public and philanthropists who are being fed a somewhat inaccurate story of the crisis.

The real crisis is that the investments we have made in water and sanitation have not succeeded in transforming lives through sustained water supply and sanitation services. And, sadly, poor people around the world will not benefit from new campaigns or larger amounts of aid until we acknowledge that hard reality and take meaningful steps to change the way we work.

With so much ingenious technology being developed by social entrepreneurs around the world, one of the great remaining challenges is figuring out how to make it available to the people who need it—first by letting them know that it exists, and then by raising the money to pay for it.

For now, technologists and their affiliate organizations usually identify the populations that might benefit from these new tools, for the simple reason that small local NGOs have no simple way of learning about new technology when it becomes available.

Kopernik, a new organization founded by two former UN staff members, Ewa Wojkowska and Toshi Nakamura, proposes to solve this problem by creating what they call an Amazon.com of life-changing technology—a marketplace that allows local NGOs, who understand their own needs best, to discover products that would help them.

After that, these NGOs can apply for funding, in the form of microdonations. Anyone can look through a list of proposals on Kopernik’s website and contribute toward an organization’s goal. For example, a local NGO in East Timor that fights domestic violence and promotes gender equality hopes to raise $4,990 to buy 30 Q-Drums. The Q-Drum is a “durable, donut-shaped” 50-liter water container that can be transported by rolling rather than hoisting on one’s head or shoulder. (See a video of one in use here.) In East Timor, where women and girls fetch water over long distances several times a day in 5-liter plastic jerry cans, the Q-Drum could save time and great physical strain.

One of the most promising aspects of the Kopernik marketplace is a rating system that gives technology makers the opportunity to hear from local groups about how they used the product and how it might be refined. “We want to know whether it’s effective, whether it’s appropriate, and areas for improvement,” Wojkowska says.

So far, Kopernik has formed partnerships with 12 technology organizations, 10 for-profit and 2 nonprofit. In addition to the Q-Drum, the list of technologies includes a compact solar-powered water-treatment unit for the home; a portable water filter used like a straw; eyeglasses whose corrective settings can be adjusted by the user (watch 2009 PopTech fellow Emily Pilloton fit Stephen Colbert with a pair here); a solar-powered LED lantern; and a digital hearing aid with rechargeable batteries.

Wojkowska and Nakamura founded Kopernik after observing the limitations of the traditional approach to development work. Last year, for instance, Nakamura observed development efforts in the eastern part of Sri Lanka, where workers are helping the community in its long-term recovery from the 2004 tsunami. One of their projects was to distribute buckets so that people could collect water for their households. The Q-Drum wasn’t on the radar. A related problem is that international organizations often reuse the same solutions in places that culturally and geographically are very different from each other. Sometimes this works; sometimes it could work better.

A side benefit of giving local NGOs a menu of technologies to choose from, Wojkowska says, is that it helps them think in a focused way about what their most pressing needs are and whether a technological solution is appropriate. So far, approximately 200 local NGOs of all sizes and kinds have applied to be part of Kopernik’s network. (Kopernik vets them to ensure that they are worthy recipients and that they can afford to disseminate the products if they receive them.)

Right now, Kopernik is building its catalog of products and screening potential recipient organizations. In the future, Wojkowska and Nakamura hope to entice entrepreneurs to sell some of these products locally, to reach those who are not served by NGOs. They are also exploring ways to bring locally developed solutions into general production. In all these projects, Wojkowska says, the point is to “give choice and voice to local communities.”

Today’s young techologists dreaming of a future in social entrepreneurship are more culturally sensitive than ever before, says Manish Bhardwaj, the CEO and co-founder of Innovators in Health. Even undergraduates recognize that their projects in the developing world must be “culturally sensitive, infrastructurally sensitive, and economically sensitive”: they must take into account the values of the local community, not presume the existence of electric power in a village that might have none, not create a product that the local population could never afford.

Biometric demo. Credit: Innovators in Health.

All the more bewildering for these aspiring technologists, then, when they create clever solutions to urgent problems, being sensitive at every turn—and still their projects flop.

“The intriguing thing is that once you put down all the check marks for sensitive, appropriate technology, even if the customer seems willing and happy, even after that point, a lot of technology doesn’t have the impact you want it to,” says Bhardwaj.

It’s a humbling fact, and if Bhardwaj’s advice has a theme, it is that technologists can afford to be humbler. Your new technology may not be as revolutionary as you think; your customers may not want it; and it may not fix the problem by itself. Bhardwaj delivered these harsh truths—which he means as encouragement—in the form of a talk this month to students at MIT, where he recently earned a doctorate. (MIT’s ten-month-old Dalai Lama Center for Ethics & Transformative Values, where Bhardwaj is a fellow, hosted the event.)

One misunderstanding, says Bhardwaj, is that your creation is bound to be embraced because nothing like it has ever existed before. Perhaps you would like to set up Internet kiosks in villages or reshape farming practices using sophisticated atmospheric equipment. You may think that your competition is another technology company and define your product in relation to that competition, when in fact there may be imperfect but adequate solutions already in force that have history and familiarity on their side. Your Internet kiosks may be competing with a man on a bicycle who relays information from village to village. Your farming technology may be competing with a local sage who has been predicting the weather for years. For your product to succeed, you will not only have to persuade your customers that your technology is better than other technologists’ but better than longstanding local practices.

Even if your product will save lives, you may well have to prove its worth. Bhardwaj mentions a memorable article published in The New Yorker last December describing efforts in Africa to replace soot-producing home stoves with clean-burning ones. The old stoves contribute to various diseases, as well as climate change, but local people thought of the smoke as an annoyance that could be tolerated and were reluctant to make a change. (As Bhardwaj points out, someone can always produce “an 80-year-old grandma who has been cooking over that stove forever.”) This problem is not specific to the developing world, of course: it is the reason that, despite knowing about lung cancer and traffic fatalities, we still smoke cigarettes and text while driving.

The solution is to find new ways to communicate the importance of your product, and also to create what Bhardwaj calls “secondary incentives.” For instance, a major project in the 1980s built free or highly subsidized toilets in India to improve sanitary conditions and clean up the drinking water. But because these new toilets were such a luxury, local people used them to store grains, to store poultry, even for religious rituals. (“Think of a mud hut, and then think of a beautiful new structure,” says Bhardwaj. “Are you going to defecate in the nicest part of your house?”) One strategy that wound up working there was sending NGO workers to local villages, where they would take a glass of water, add a drop of fecal matter to it, then pass the glass around to see if anyone would like to take a drink. When people were aghast, they said, This is what you do every day.

As for secondary incentives, one NGO created a range of options (priced between $7.40 and $74) and hired local people to encourage their neighbors to buy toilets (and offered these “motivators” commissions). This helped people to see toilets as fitting organically into their communities—as status symbols, even. When people were not persuaded by the idea of preserving their own health, they were reminded that their children’s health was at stake, and their community’s. “You have to appeal to people’s idealism and vanity both,” says Bhardwaj.

Priyanka Kumari and Shashi Pallwal test the uBox in Dhanarua, Bihar. Credit: Innovators In Health.

In the end, one of the toughest lessons for the technologist is that not all problems can be solved through technology. Bhardwaj’s organization, Innovators in Health, has developed high-tech products that it hopes will combat tuberculosis in India: a fingerprint logger that can reliably establish when patients receive medicine from providers and transmit that information wirelessly (developed with Microsoft Research India); a smart pillbox that reminds patients to take their medicine and keeps track of when they do (developed with Abiogenix). But these innovations would be useless, says Bhardwaj, if their partners in the region (Operation ASHA in Delhi and the Prajnopaya Foundation in Bihar) had not already developed largely successful TB treatment programs.

“We can only make a program that is good, excellent; we can’t make a program that is bad, good. If you go to an area where no programs exist, you have to be honest: in this region, what we need to do is start a treatment program, and if that’s not our primary focus or competency, we need to bring in others,” says Bhardwaj. “If you want to change the world, you have to be very honest about what needs changing.”

If you need a clear sign that new ideas are needed to save public education in Kenya, look no further than Tuesday’s announcement by U.S. Ambassador Michael Ranneberger that the United States is suspending almost $7 million in aid to the Kenyan ministry of education until fraud in the Free Public Education program is addressed.

That seven-year-old program brought an influx of previously disenfranchised students into the national education system, but in the process created as many problems as it solved: class size rose, teacher recruitment stalled, and the program became dependent on outside donations from foreign governments and international organizations. That’s before you even reach the corruption that has siphoned off almost $1.5 million, or the program’s doubtful educational results.

A new venture called Bridge International Academies is reinventing the model for education in Kenya by taking a page from franchise-based corporations.


Father dropping off a child at a Bridge International Academy school with a “barn” style roof for air ventilation, an innovation in an area where many buildings have no windows or air vents. Credit: Bridge International Academies.

Bridge is rigorously studying and evaluating how to deliver the best quality education to Kenyan primary-school students at the lowest possible cost, but the most innovative aspect of their program is that they are examining every aspect of opening and running a school with an eye toward replication, so that new schools can be opened, many at a time, of a consistently high quality.

“Everything we do is done with the plan to scale to thousands of schools,” one of Bridge’s founders, Shannon May, told me. “Like other successful, large-network or franchise-based corporations, we are resolutely data-driven and process-oriented in order to achieve our mission. … We know of no other organization that is putting together what we call the entire school-in-a-box: all the systems and processes, from land acquisition and construction, to curriculum development and teacher training, to educational performance monitoring and evaluation, to school management training and auditing, to financing and accounting systems.

Bridge was founded in 2007 by three Americans: Jay Kimmelman, the entrepreneur behind the software company EduSoft, which helps U.S. public schools analyze student-performance data; Phil Frei, a technologist whose last venture enabled Malawian farmers to reduce the amount of wood they consumed in curing tobacco (Malawi’s chief export), thus combating deforestation; and Shannon May, an anthropologist who specializes in sustainable development. Together they have assembled a social-enterprise project that borrows techniques from business and social science to create a network of high-quality schools that remain accountable to parents.

So far, the results are promising. Three weeks ago, Bridge opened five new schools at once (they opened their first two, one at a time, in 2009), and average enrollment is already 119—a sign that parents have found reason to prefer Bridge schools to the more established private schools in the area. Early testing shows that Bridge students are substantially outperforming their peers across Nairobi in core reading and math skills. According to May, these students are even closing the achievement gap in English reading performance with students of the same age in the United States.

Rigorous evaluation, which international development projects sometimes shortchange, is a central part of Bridge’s model. (For more about how social-science analysis can make development and anti-poverty efforts more effective, watch Esther Duflo’s 2009 PopTech talk.) To measure educational and financial success, Bridge sets ideal costs for buying land and building schools, costs and schedules for hiring and training teachers and school managers (who are also hired locally), standards for teaching and teacher oversight, and standards for student performance. Bridge uses “direct instruction” to maintain a rigorous and consistent education in independently administered schools, scripting each class carefully so that, according to May, “we know exactly what is being taught at any given minute in the classroom, and exactly how it is being taught.”


Inside of a classroom with engaged students. Credit: Bridge International Academies.

To reduce corruption, Bridge runs what it calls a cashless school. All payments, incoming and outgoing, including payroll for all kinds of workers (teachers, school managers, construction workers), money for construction materials and school materials, and receipts of school fees, are made through the M-PESA mobile-phone payment system or Equity Bank. Signs in schools remind teachers and parents that Bridge employees should never ask for money, with a phone number for reporting violations. Off site, Bridge staff members use regular attendance reports to double-check that no student’s fees are diverted.

Can poor families afford these fees? A family pays 295 Kenyan shillings a month to send a child to a Bridge school. That’s less than $4, or about one day’s pay—usually the cheapest option, or among the cheapest ones, available in a given area. And relying on parents rather than outside organizations for funding makes the project more sustainable, reduces opportunities for corruption by shortening the path between funder and school, and above all, makes the schools accountable to parents above all others.

“By running [Bridge] as a for-profit, the target population is changed from a beneficiary to a customer, and in that change they gain all the power,” says May. “It is the customer that can keep us in or put us out of business. It is the customer, our parents, who are in charge, and that is exactly how we want it.”

Parents are willing to pay for their children to attend Bridge schools, says May, because just walking past the school they can see evidence of the quality of the enterprise. These signs of quality may seem modest by our standards, but they are significant: Children are in class during class time. Teachers are in class, too, and they are actively teaching. Lessons are interactive, with frequent responses from students. “From the parents’ perspective,” says May, “this means that there is never a time they walk by a classroom and see a teacher wondering what to write on the board, or confused about the correct answer to a problem, or sitting at their desk while the students ‘self-study.’”

In December, Omidyar Network gave Bridge International Academies a $1.8 million grant [updated February 1, 2010] equity investment (which will be repaid along with additional returns) to scale up its network of schools. Seven schools exist so far; in May, between five and ten more will open. After that, Bridge hopes to launch at least ten schools at a time and very quickly start launching 20 to 30 schools at a time. Within five to eight years, Bridge intends to open hundreds of schools annually and expand into other parts of Kenya and other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, with the goal of establishing 1,800 schools by 2015. Crystal Hutter, the investment lead for Omidyar Network, says that if the program succeeds, it could serve as a model for other parts of the world and other areas of social enterprise. -- Joshua J. Friedman is a writer in New York City. He is a former editor of The Atlantic and Boston Review.