If you took a quick look at the rural water supply and sanitation situation in Malawi, you’d think that things were in great shape—over 40,000 rural water points and toilets outside most homes—almost 80% coverage. But if you dig a little deeper, you’ll see a different reality—sustainability and actual usage are serious concerns. Water points are often placed haphazardly, based on ease of drilling, political need, or NGO desire. A significant proportion of existing water points are either broken or placed poorly, meaning they run dry when they’re needed most. Many latrines aren’t actually used by all household members and once basic latrines are in place there is little support for households to adopt increasingly effective sanitation technologies. Interventions have focused on increasing the number of wells or latrines when, in fact, there’s a fundamental need to focus on the larger water and sanitation system—the support and maintenance mechanisms that ensure water points are providing water continuously and long-term sanitation facilities aren’t just available but are actually being used and continuously improved.
EWB is focused on that systemic need, incubating and scaling innovations that are allowing the government to improve management systems, identifying ways to ensure wells are monitored and maintained, and ensuring that sanitation efforts lead to learning and usage.
Systemic Innovations
Government
Decision Support System (DSS) EWB has worked with government partners to create a simple spreadsheet-based decision support system. It maps water coverage, identifies the status of water points, and shows where rehabilitations and new installations are needed most. It’s deliberately simple to use, low-cost, and limited in scope—multiple similar initiatives have failed due to complexity of technology and cost of updates. In mid-2011, the DSS was officially recommended for adoption nationally by a large group of NGOs and government employees during a national conference on water supply monitoring.
Learning in the Sanitation Sector EWB plays a unique and important role in the sanitation sector. We’re coordinating efforts on a national level, allowing different groups—field staff, local government, national ministries, NGOs, and donors—to share information and lessons in order to rapidly improve approaches and ensure successes are replicated at scale. Implementation of sanitation approaches have been far from perfect and often miss their intended results. One such approach is Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS). To ensure the success of CLTS and other promising approaches, EWB helps inform policy decisions with field-level information, connects implementers with each other for mutual learning, and facilitates feedback loops throughout the sector. We also innovate on operational efficiency models for low-resource environments; these innovations are disseminated and scaled through our connections with key ministries and membership in a national sanitation coordinating body. Our work has led to harmonizing district-level monitoring and evaluation indicators and to new ideas for increasing sanitation services to communities through the use of decentralized structures.
Community Organizations
Maintenance and Financing Water point maintenance is a pressing issue throughout Malawi. Since the 1980s, the burden of responsibility for water point repair has increasingly shifted from government to communities. Results have been, at best, mixed. Everyone believes communities have a role to play, but what is that role? Can communities handle minor water point repairs? Major repairs? Full rehabilitations? EWB is piloting approaches to answer these questions, change how communities play their roles in water point maintenance, and guide government, donor, and NGO programs towards providing communities with appropriate support.
Business
Small Business Repair Services While community members in Malawi are responsible for carrying out many aspects of water point maintenance, when their water point breaks down they often struggle to access the repair skills needed to ensure limited down time and a quick restoration of service—providing easily accessible repair services is a key role for the private sector to play in rural water supply. EWB is providing knowledge, training, and research support to our partners to develop and pilot innovative private- and public-sector models for providing these crucial repair services.
NGOs
EWB staff are sought by other NGOs for their strong local insight, understanding of water and sanitation systems in Malawi, and ability to deliver results in a wide range of situations. They’re partnering with these organizations, and are helping them ensure projects are focused on outcomes that lead to long-term systemic development and impact, rather than short-term, short-lived results. It’s a major point of leverage—by sharing knowledge with these organizations, we extend our reach significantly.
Key partners in Malawi:
- WaterAid Malawi
- PumpAid Malawi
- InterAide Malawi
- Water and Environmental Sanitation Network (WESNet)
- Plan Malawi
- UNICEF Malawi
Support to Donors
While most non-profit organizations seek support from donors, EWB provides support to donors in the form of local insight and understanding. Donors may not have access to up-to-date information on field realities or insight into how the projects they fund are being implemented. EWB provides this insight, helping them make smarter investments, and also serves a performance-consulting role, embedding with the implementing NGOs and governments to optimize their projects. EWB is one of the only organizations in the world that’s offering this service, if not the only one. By sharing our unique insight into on-the-ground realities with these donors, we’re multiplying the value of every dollar they invest in change in Malawi.
Our donor support isn’t limited to one country—EWB is helping to guide donor investments and decisions everywhere we work. We’re not a giant organization, and we know that those bringing more money into the system also play a strong influencing role. We offer ground-level expertise to ensure that role is as positive as possible.
Team Members
- Megan Campbell
- Michael Kang
- Jolly Ann Maulit
- Alyssa Lindsay
- Duncan McNicholl
- Sydney Byrns
- Genevieve Parent
- Jordan Daniow
- Macmillan Chikhoza
- Lisa Boyd
- Tessa Roselli
- Kristina Nilsson
- Jean-Francois Soubliere
- Ashley Meek
- Owen Scott
- Imran Hamdad
- Kevin Hanson