The 3BL Diaries: Our Journey So Far (Part 2!)
Last time on the 3BL Diaries: How We Got Started! Building, rebuilding, and fixing our pilot project! COVID!
We Get By With a Little Help From Our Friends: 3BL and the Order of the Phoenix (Season 3)
Slowly, we rose from the ashes mud. After the difficulties with our Wita project (construction issues, financing, communication and leadership), we…moved slowly. We had run out of funding for future work and with a better understanding of the scalability-lacking aspects of our financial model, we tried to regroup.
But it was slow. We were approached by the Stone Family Foundation (SFF) about funding for the future, but after looking at our current situation, they realized that we weren’t ready for expansion. But they saw the potential and connected us with an amazing team at Open Capital Advisors (OCA), a financial consulting firm based out of Nairobi, who spent time taking a deep dive into our books and helping us come up with a better solution. With this partnership, OCA helped us develop a Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO) model for financing our projects in which we would invest in communities where households would pay a connection fee equivalent to ~40% of the overall cost of the system and then pay a small fixed monthly fee over four years to pay back the investment.
With this financing model in place, we formed a partnership with Aqua for All to fund a certification and training program of our micro-utilities to improve the management of their systems while ensuring that the financial model is in place to recoup investments.
We used the model from OCA and the support from Aqua for All to develop HomeWater Fund to invest in home connections for communities. After a lot of searching, we were fortunate enough to recently get seed capital for HomeWater Fund from Stone Family Foundation (along with a couple of other partners). So starting in the next two months, we will be building our next set of micro-grids in the community of Semen Shershera while moving onto the town of Hamus Gebeya after we finish.
The future is looking up and as we prove the value of investing in rural household connections, we’ll be expanding HomeWater Fund, getting water into the homes of tens of thousands of rural Ethiopians.
Learn more about HomeWater Fund at, appropriately, https://www.homewaterfund.com!
The Flowius Cinematic Universe: Flowius Sustain (Spinoff, Season 1)
But wait, there’s more! Throughout this process, we’ve been working with government, community, and NGO partners with a consistent message from all sides: maintenance of existing rural water systems is extremely poor. Currently, it’s estimated that 11% of rural water supply systems in Ethiopia are entirely non-functional. This doesn’t count the number of systems that break down for weeks or months at a time, leaving communities without water access - you may remember this from Part 1 when the pump in Wita was broken for 15 months.
Every time we attended conferences and events, people from across the spectrum of water services lamented the state of rural water maintenance. From this, we hit upon an idea: we’re doing this already with our water systems - why not do it for existing water supply?
As we know, maintenance is less expensive than repair - a great example of this being the cost to change the oil in your car vs. the cost of having your engine seize up because you failed to change the oil for the last three years. So despite our general collective understanding of the benefits of maintenance, why are we as a species still ineffective at it?
Depending on your definition of human (Australopithecus of Lucy fame vs the homo sapiens of today), we’ve been around for at least 200,000 years, yet we only began to leave hunting and gathering 10,000 years ago. Thus, for 95% of human history, we’ve been forced to look at what’s directly in front of us - long term planning was mostly unnecessary.
Okay, I could go on and on about this and how it affects our daily lives, but that will have to wait for another post.
But the main issue is that maintenance requires regular, sustained action before breakdown and so it can feel hard to justify the cost required. The saying is “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” not “If it ain’t broke, provide regular service so that it doesn’t break down.” This is especially true for rural, low-income people because a few dollars here and there for something that feels like it may never come is a big personal risk when that could be spent on your farm or on education. Yet the cost for repairs must come from somewhere and inevitably, more is spent so a little up front will save a lot (not to mention the improvements in water access).
So with Flowius Sustain, we’re not just looking at how to maintain systems better, but how to actually improve both technical and financial management of existing water systems. We’re not taking over the management of these systems, but supporting communities, WASHCos (water, sanitation, and hygiene committees for the uninitiated), utilities, NGOs, farmer groups, and governments with our services. This means that organizations will be able to digitally track all the payments made to them by households and farmers while also managing expenses and their savings balances so that we can help them improve their understanding of cash flow, improve transparency, thus enhancing the financial health of water systems. We also provide tools to help track all repairs, spare parts and inventory, and schedule preventative maintenance, while also connecting communities to technicians when advanced repairs are needed.
Right now, we’re supporting COOPI in the communities of Boryale and Fikow, near the town of Dolo Ado on the border with Kenya and Somalia with enhanced management of two solar powered irrigation systems. We’re expanding our work to support other organizations aiming to improve their management systems, so we’ll have more coming on Flowius Sustain!
With 3BL, we’re working to improve water access and management across rural Ethiopia. Join us.
- Chris