I recently had the good fortune to spend an entire day talking about clean water with a group of colleagues from various agencies in Vietnam. We were in Dai Thu, north of Hanoi, at the Flamingo resort for a retreat organized by EMW in collaboration with the Vietnam Women’s Union and AusAid. The idea was to get an overview of the water and sanitation sector in Vietnam, and figure out how to position EMW strategically to push the creation of more water and sanitation systems.
What I heard was both inspiring and disturbing – according to a report from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD), the majority of new clean water systems fail. This is the disturbing part; I’ll get to the inspiring bit in a minute. It sound difficult to believe, but the report says that between 60 and 70% of all new water systems built either by the government or by international agencies stop working in under two years, with most failing to last even one year and nearly 30% never working at all.
The systems, by and large, are overbuilt, expensive failures of engineering and social development, with virtually no serious attention paid to preventative maintenance, value engineering, good-quality components, community buy-in and financial sustainability. In fact, for government-built systems, it is often the case that the government will build only the water tower and pumping house, leaving the actual delivery of the water to people’s homes up to the local commune authorities to figure out. This rarely happens.
I’ve seen many of these projects myself in the field. One in particular strikes my memory; built by one of the world’s leading clean water agencies, this project featured a giant pump house, two large wells, and four big concrete cisterns that stored the pumped water for people to come and collect. On the day I visited, the commune leader accosted me with a legal-sized sheet of paper, one side of which was densely covered in writing. He then proceed to harangue me for 20 minutes, going over in detail all the thing wrong with the water system – the pumps cost a fortune to run, they break down all the time, the cisterns were not big enough so that only the people who lined up very early in the morning got water, and on and on.
This was the side of the paper labeled “things that are bad about our new water system.” He then turned the paper over to the side labeled “things that are good about our new water system.” The sheet was blank – “Nothing is good about this system,” he yelled. “Not one thing!”
This is tragic. This system probably cost between $150,000 and $250,000 to build. What a waste of money and goodwill, not to mention the crushed expectations of the villagers. EMW re-built that water system five years ago, running pipes to every home in the village. It continues to deliver clean water, seven days a week, 24 hours a day.
In fact, the EMW failure rate for new water systems is practically zero. We guarantee every system for one year, and monitor them for up to five years. Over the past decade, we have added over 350,000 people to one of our water systems; in the past two or three years, we have only had one water system stop working. This was because the road-building authority ran over the pipes, breaking them all. Some of the much older systems – built eight or ten years ago – are falling apart, it’s true. They need to be upgraded. But even looking back at the systems built eight to ten years ago, more than 80% are still functioning.
And here’s the crazy thing – our systems cost half as much as those built by other agencies or the government.
“How can this be?” you might ask. “What magic formula has EMW discovered?”
It’s not magic, and here is the inspiring part of this article. Our success is built on the hard work of the local staff, who pay very close attention to high-quality value engineering, training of local water managers, financial sustainability, community buy-in and rigorous quality control every step of the way. If we can do it, so can any other agency. It’s a real shame that so many of them don’t try.