Blantyre is a city that, like many other cities around the developing world, is growing rapidly and in unplanned ways.  Houses, shacks, and informal dwellings pop up in unexpected areas and stretch city resources beyond their capacity. These new settlements have limited if any access to the main water network and sanitary facilities are rudimentary or non-existent.  Each Low Income Area (LIA) contains almost everything – street shops, informal markets, barber shops and salons, informal bars, repair shops, taxi ranks, wealthier households, landlords and tenants.
 
LIAs are also graveyards for failed water and sanitation projects.  Abandoned and poorly constructed toilets litter the city like trash, some with the name of the organization who implemented the latrine blazoned across one wall.  Kiosks have become stalls for sellers of oranges or places to meet and gossip, instead of places to collect water.  We visited one LIA (Ndirande) that the BWB estimates has 72 water kiosks for over 118,000 people.  A City Assembly representative estimated that 40-50 of these kiosks were broken.
 
Vennings Kayuzga is the Chair of the Nkolokoti-Kachere Water Users Association (WUA) who is showing that failed water points do not have to dominate Blantyre’s landscape.  Water For People helped Vennings restart water supply in Nkolokoti-Kachere with a light touch – focused on a more business-oriented approach to water management.  Our support focused on:

• Linkage with the BWB to ensure a regular supply of water (easy as the BWB is working hard at achieving this objective) and allow the WUA to start selling water again to repay its debt.
• Tariffs that would are affordable to residents and would make the WUA both financially viable and allow them to extend water services by reinvesting their financial resources in new kiosks.
• Kiosk management and HR.
• Financial management.
• Technical skills in system maintenance and repair.
• Transparent reporting so that residents could see how funds were being used
• Helped develop a meter reading protocol so that they can defend meter results and not fall prey to the creative math that dominates meter reading worldwide and leads to overpaying for water supplies by local operators.

 
Water For People provided financial support (not 100%) for the construction of a new kiosk and the re-establishment of water supplies to that kiosk.  We continued to provide technical support to the WUA and withdrew that support at a careful pace as the WUA started to thrive.  The goal was to make the WUA viable, not to simply build lots of kiosks that would stretch their capacity and lead to more broken water points.  The outcomes of this work have been impressive:

• The WUA paid off their water debt of $11,486.
• They have rehabilitated or installed new kiosks in an additional 36 locations in Nkolokoti-Kachere with their own finances.  They are now managing 37 kiosks and Vennings is planning on a further 80.  "I need more kiosks so I can make more money that I can use to invest in more kiosks," he told me.  Absolutely.
• They hold annual meetings to explain to residents what they have done with the money collected, what repairs they have done and what further extensions they want to implement.
• They have 37 tap operators – 35 of them are women.  They are creating jobs in Blantyre, for women!
• They are now being called by the Blantyre Water Board to help other LIA operators and to even help repair water breaks.

 
Water For People could have NGOed this – we could have built lots of kiosks, made a case for extending services rapidly and focused on hardware with a quiet nod to the operation of the system.  We could have pushed for volunteers to run the WUA.  And we could have counted a lot of beneficiaries pretty quickly – 38,000.  We could have not paid any attention whatsoever to what happened in the future – we counted our beneficiaries in 2009 and that is all that matters, whether the systems are functioning or not in 2010.   
 
We chose a different path – less glamorous to be sure, but more effective, by focusing on tariffs and management, and allow the WUA to own the process and grow at their own pace by reinvesting in their own development.  We "claimed" just shy of 500 beneficiaries in 2009 and have watched and marveled as Vennings and his team grew the program.  They now can claim the beneficiaries – as they should because they, and not us, are the heroes.  We suggested it was perfectly fine to make a living from selling water as long as we could also show that no family was prohibited from collecting water because they were too poor to pay. This approach lured entrepreneurs like Vennings who would not waste their time on volunteer-only management models.   
 
Water flowing, people collecting water at affordable prices, services being extended from locally generated cash and strategic re-investments, jobs being created, and a model for the city emerging – pretty solid!
 
We stopped at a rehabilitated kiosk to end the day.  Women collecting water, money changing hands with the woman water operator who earns a salary from her job, almost all is good.  The operator tells Vennings that there is a small leak and he immediately goes to investigate.  Sure enough – small drops fall to the ground at a point just beyond their meter.  Vennings starts dialing his cell phone.  He reaches the WUA plumber, explains the problem and tells him tambalas (Malawian currency) are being lost.  He hangs up, smiles and says "It will be fixed right away.  We need those tambalas to build more kiosks."  I smile – this guy does not need us or any other NGO ever again.  Success!
 
One kiosk, a bit of technical help and trust in problem solvers like Vennings – a light touch.