Our Water to the Home story

The Foundation began in 2005 with a pilot portfolio of ten projects across different countries and sectors. This early phase was designed to test options and learn what could create the greatest long-term impact. One lesson was clear: to quote the famous American philanthropist, Carnegie, “It is harder to give money away intelligently than to earn it in the first place”. From the experience gained from this pilot portfolio, we chose to concentrate our resources on water and sanitation (WASH).

Cambodia as proof of concept
As an example of our decision to support market-based solutions, we provided risk capital to scale up an exceptionally successful sanitation marketing programme in Cambodia. This programme not only delivered spectacular results, increasing latrine ownership from 20% to 70%, but also led to the creation of the world’s first WASH Development Impact Bond, a $10 million partnership with USAID. This enabled iDE to increase latrine coverage to 100%.

From sanitation to Water to the Home
From 2018, we sharpened our focus to concentrate on the opportunity to begin to bring Water to the Homes of low-income households by supporting private piped water operators in rural Cambodia. These entrepreneurs proved that it is possible to deliver safe, affordable water directly into low-income households as for-profit businesses.

The great achievement which has proved the financial viability of these operators is that the rate of repayment of our loans has been 96%, in spite of the challenges of Covid. Our plan is to increase this programme from $16 million loans to $30 million for 65 operators by 2030.

Most importantly, because our experience proved that these loans are very low risk, we have been able to attract funding from impact investment funds, starting with Bridges Outcomes Partnerships.

Lessons from Cambodia and Africa
Our work in Cambodia has provided valuable insights into how water service providers can accelerate the expansion of piped networks. We learned that combining flexible infrastructure financing with targeted technical support to improve efficiency can be highly effective. Our support, in partnership with the World Bank, to increase the terms of licences from three years to 20 years in Cambodia was vital to make these enterprises bankable.

Building on the success in Cambodia, an early pilot in Ghana, starting in 2019, with Safe Water Network demonstrated the strong demand for household connections for which low-income families are prepared to pay. This pilot also confirmed that the financial viability of a piped water system far outperformed kiosk ATM models where households fetch water in jerry cans. OpEx breakeven was achieved within two years, compared to 10+ years under the traditional model.

Looking ahead
We have seen that with the right mix of regulatory support, access to finance and technical expertise, it is possible to scale affordable and sustainable water services to the home. It has given us a foundation to seek out models and innovative approaches in other contexts that with the right support can help to sustain Water to the Home at scale.

Our case studies show our strategy in action