The Business of Water

Standing by a borehole in rural Kenya last year, I watched as a stream of women trickled into the complex to collect drinking water. With a strip of cloth wrapped around their foreheads, they carried the heavy 20 liter cans slung on their backs, bent almost double under the weight of their loads. As I watched one after another fill a can and swing it over her back, I asked one of the women if I could try carrying the water a short distance. I tried - several times - to lift the container up to my head, much to the amusement of the old women now circling me, and eventually had to give up,. “How do you do this?” I asked them, as one grandma chuckled and swung the can over her back in one smooth motion, adjusted her headband and told me that it becomes easy when you do it several times a day, every day!

For millions of women in the developing world, walking for hours a day in search of water and carrying it back home is the reality of their daily struggle. This burden of providing water falls predominantly on women who, according to a study by UNICEF, in developing countries walk an average of 6km a day, carrying these 20 liters cans of water that can easily weigh 40 pounds. These trips make up hours of productive work lost, not to mention the physical burden and safety risks borne by women and girls as they transport this water. And with all that, what they find and bring back is not necessarily safe to drink, but as a woman in the desert of Rajasthan, India said to me, “at least it's water.” Worldwide, over 850 million people today still lack access to safe drinking water. Water scarcity and contamination result in millions of cases of water-borne diseases every year, with children under 5 years of age accounting for over 90% of deaths from diarrheal diseases in developing countries.

In the course of working with multiple local organizations in India and Kenya for Acumen Fund’s Ripple Effect project, I’ve come across many such women who are trapped in the cycle of the search for and transport of water. Daily they make decisions about how far they will need to walk, how long they will need to wait in queues, how much they will have to pay- and all for water that may or may not be safe to drink. Yet, solutions and technologies exist to treat the water to make it safe. Middle and upper-income consumers have a large range of high-tech household water treatment products to choose from and the bottled water industry is a thriving and growing one. But for the poor, these are out of their economic reach. Even when clean water sources are available, another challenge in this long journey of water is the ‘last mile’ distribution one. Water, clean at source, can still become contaminated during transportation and storage. It is this very issue that the Ripple Effect project has been addressing over the past year by testing innovative ideas to improve access to water for the poor.

One such pilot idea at its conclusion saw safe water now reaching thousands in a small village in Rajasthan, India. With the help of the local NGO, the Jal Bhagirathi Foundation, a new distribution model was created in the village in a unique partnership between the community (that owns and operates the plant), local government (that provides access to raw water and building for the plant) and the private sector (that provided the water treatment technology). By joining these multiple stakeholders through an effective business model, an economically sustainable enterprise in now in operation. From one central treatment plant, water is now being sold to several depots managed by women entrepreneurs from Self-Help-Groups in the village, who in turn sell it at a profit. In the early stages of the project, as I sat in the home of one of these women, I asked her who will run the water depot from her house. “I will,” she said proudly, from behind a long veil hiding her face from the men in the house. “This will be my business.” Today, she and other women like her, are bringing water closer to the communities that need it and earning a living by making it their business.