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.