Q&A: Ned Breslin on Rethinking Hydro-Philanthropy in Water Aid

Ned Breslin:   Part of the reason that Hydro-Philanthropy was written was to try to have a much more honest debate about the impact and effectiveness of water sanitation interventions worldwide. Then it looked at two kinds of subsets: one is looking at rethinking the way that philanthropists invest their money and moving away from 100 percent grant for water and sanitation infrastructure, which I think has now widely been shown to distort markets and to raise questions about the viability of water and sanitation systems over time when people don’t have a financial stake in it from the beginning, and [which is] really challenging the kind of singular sector metric of beneficiaries. Every organization will tell you how many people they helped last year, and that’s a great thing. It’s really important to know how many people got improved services in any given year, but the real question is how many of them have water flowing and latrines used five years after the intervention, or 10 years after the intervention. 

The metrics that drive this sector are, in many ways, the causes of some of the problems in the sector. It’s very short term. It’s very short focused, looking at what happened last year, [and] not thinking long term. It came about frankly from working the sector for so long. I was first introduced to water and sanitation issues when I worked in northern Kenya 1987, and I spent most of my time working in water and sanitation on project rehabilitations–going back and fixing projects that have failed in the past. The ideas in Hydro-Philanthropy are ones that have really emerged from 20 plus years of field experience, and a realization that the sector has the capacity. It has really great people who want to change things, but we need to have a much more honest debate about what’s going wrong and not just fall back on standard 2.6 billion people don’t have sanitation arguments which don’t move the sector, I don’t think.

Ned Breslin:   The paper has gone into a number of organizations: Healing Waters, Living Water, a few others, who have taken the paper and said, ‘You know, we’re going to rethink our metric space on this. We think it’s absolutely right.’ There has been some concern with the paper, particularly among those who really believe that the time is right for the world to get behind water and sanitation issues and an argument that says, well, a lot of the money that we’ve invested in the past hasn’t worked too well, dilutes, or hurts that momentum. It’s an argument I’m not particularly inspired by. I think we don’t help poor people by not being honest about what we’ve done. That argument, which has been a very small group of people, I would say that the response has been overwhelmingly positive. The interesting thing is really what organizations are going to do with it. I know it’s lead to some big changes within Water for People rethinking our metrics, and when I go to the field now I’ll constantly say to staff, ‘This is a really nice hand pump, but it might be nice to see this in 10 years still functioning.’ It gets staff and partners to really rethink the way they work, which is great.

Ned Breslin:  Yeah, I tell a very personal story. When I lived in Mozambique for seven years and both my daughters were raised there, they had two great friends: Anita and Ophelia. Anita and Ophelia were lovely girls, really a lot of fun. When Anita was about ten, I asked her, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ and she said she wanted to be a teacher. I said to Ophelia, ‘What do you want to be?’—and she was about eight at the time, she’s a little younger than Anita—and she said she wanted to be a doctor. 

The problem they had was they spent an enormous amount of time fetching water. I was particularly horrified because a group came in and improved their water system and came for the ribbon cutting ceremony. [They] cut the ribbons [and] took lots of pictures. Within a year that system had broken, and Anita and Ophelia were back in the unprotected sources they thought they had long abandoned. [But] they ended up being the beneficiaries of three different organizations. Three organizations came in and either installed the first system or rehabilitated it–and all of them claimed them as beneficiaries–but the system kept breaking. The end of the story is that the system finally got worked out properly. A group came in and financed and worked out the tariff policy much more effectively, and developed the different operations and maintenance scheme. So, the system ran for a while, [but] Anita didn’t make it. She ended up missing so much school fetching water that she’s basically illiterate and she will not be a teacher. She’s now moved into the kind of underground Shabeen world, which is kind of a home brew liquor world of Lichinga, so she will not be a teacher. Ophelia is about ready to go to college. We’re hopeful that she’ll someday be a doctor–that would be great. That story [of] these kind of older sisters to my two daughters has always been a very powerful influence on me.

Ned Breslin:   One of the things Water for People does is we insist that our money is used as leverage with local government finance and with community finance. People have to put money on the table before we do. What that looks like in practice in some places like Bolivia, the government pays 50 percent of all hardware costs in any project that we support, communities have to pay anywhere from 15 to 20 percent of the cost, and then we pay the balance. The challenges with that particular type of program are many. One is viewing that and implementing that in an environment where other agencies don’t operate in that way is actually quite complex. We are constantly in battles at the field level where communities will rightly say to us, ‘Why are we paying, when that village over there isn’t paying?’ On the kind of longer-term view of things, [we ask] institutionally, are you ready to heard bad news? Are you ready to first commit way after a project finishes, which means you’re going to allocate money to it, to track changes over time? And then what happens if things go wrong? Are you going to take responsibility for that? Are you going to learn from it and apply it in other places, or are you going to come up with lots of excuses why that possibly happened? It’s a big cultural shift. It’s a big shift internally to have that kind of honest discussion.

Ned Breslin:   The challenge is not only how do you have an honest discussion that pulls people on and educates people so that they understand that water and sanitation, or agriculture, or health care, or energy are not easy. These are not easy things. Really good utilities around the United States do quite well by having hard questions asked of them, and good checks in place, and lots of different eyes on what’s happening, and the ability of people to speak out when things don’t go as planned, as well as the ability to speak out and celebrate when things go very well. We’ve been really kind of trying to challenge the quick fix solutions of it all. That runs against a really interesting trend in the United States, which is this kind of trend towards more hands-on volunteerism. I get it. I thinks that’s totally understandable and that’s a really powerful thing. Again, how do you do that in a way that leads to kind of lasting and transformative change [in] a sector like water or sanitation, where the fixes are not short term? You cannot install a water system in a week visit from the United States to Rwanda–it’s just not possible. It’s not possible to get the technology right. It’s not possible to get everyone involved. It’s not possible to get the tariffs and the finances right. It takes time.

Ned Breslin:   A bad day in the field is when a local operator who you spend an enormous amount of time training to fix a water point decides that he or she can make more money in the city than in the rural are that they are in, so they leave. 

A bad day is when you’ve worked with a community for a very long time to set up a project—and you’ve got government finances involved and community finances involved and all that—and then some other organization comes in on the side and does a very quick project and kind of changes everything what was being planned. A bad day is when a committee disintegrates because of conflict in the village. A bad day is when a local government decides that they’re not going to finance water and sanitation anymore; they’re going to put it all into roads.

Ned Breslin:   I think the biggest transformative change that is likely to happen is alternative media and alternative ways of communicating are starting to bring to light some of the challenges. A group of people in Nairobi, for instance, are getting water from a tap and all of a sudden the tap runs dry and they don’t get water for three days. In the past, they’ve been hidden in silence and nobody knew about it, but now with new technology–with flip cameras, with Twitter–with all these things, we’re starting to find ways for people to say, ‘Hey, wait a minute. We don’t have water over here.’ We’re trying to find ways to get that visualized and highlighted at such a level that it leads to better responses from a different actor. I think other kinds of transformative changes are going to happen around rethinking the way that the local private sector is engaged and operates within the water and sanitation space. I think we’re starting to see a lot of models around franchising and kind of circuit rider programs where the challenge of community water committees, which are fragile and difficult in many parts of the world. I wouldn’t say that for Latin America, but certainly for African nations, I think alternatives are starting to merge for that, which is good. 

I think there is definitely a bigger push within the philanthropic world for more honest reporting, and a more accountable way to hold people responsible for results over time. I think this view of longer term results is really catching on. Part of the point of the Hydro-Philanthropy paper was to say to philanthropists, ‘Ask hard questions. You guys are all smart people who have decided to be philanthropists for all the right reasons, but make sure you’re investments are impactful and not just impactful right away.’

Ned Breslin:    They get them because they see the world in a little bit of a different way, but they’re both extremely passionate and have personal experiences carrying water. They have personal experiences trying to care for friends who have AIDS and watching people die. They have personal experiences with people with malaria. They also, on a positive side, have personal experiences with the joy of Africa, and the playfulness, and the fun, and the laughter. I think they have a much more nuance view of the world. That’s the hope. I see lots of little kids like my daughters who have started to engage in issues around the world who are much more thoughtful and give me great hope for the next generations, I guess.