NextBillion - A WDI Publication

For decades, rural water projects in low- and middle-income countries have followed a familiar pattern: Infrastructure is built, communities are trained, a ribbon is cut — and within a few years, the system stops working. According to UNICEF, 30-40% of the rural water supply in low-income countries does not function at any given time. And without maintenance built into the original design, rural water infrastructure often falls into disrepair within five to eight years.

These failures are commonly explained in terms of weak institutions, limited community ownership or insufficient funding. However, after building and leading the early operations of Max TapWater, a social enterprise providing a piped water system to rural households in Bangladesh, I realised the deeper reason is far simpler: Organisations underestimate the complexity of water systems’ operations. Keeping a system running reliably demands unglamorous day-to-day service delivery, revenue collection, preventive maintenance, customer service, staff incentives and rapid repair of any mechanical issues — and all of that takes time, resources and discipline.

Yet despite longstanding awareness of the need to treat water as an ongoing service, investment in the sector continues to prioritise capital infrastructure over the operational and maintenance budget needed to sustain it. This is a pattern that perpetuates system failure rather than preventing it. Pipes are often laid faster than the maintenance systems, finances and supply chains required to sustain them. In many cases, when donor funding ends, the infrastructure remains, but the water stops flowing.

We learned these pitfalls first-hand at Max TapWater, where I led the early development of a water utility grid that connected 10,000 clients. Our early assumptions and the mistakes we made when building this multi-site rural water enterprise taught us what actually keeps the water flowing beyond the grant period.

The common failure pattern in rural water supply

Before starting operation, we observed multiple rural water systems throughout Bangladesh and noticed a recurring set of challenges, which often involved prioritising the delivery of assets over the delivery of services.

First, in our experience, infrastructure often accounted for a majority of the budget, leaving little room for operations and maintenance costs. Instead, these activities were treated as an afterthought. While operations and maintenance plans existed on paper, they were rarely backed by realistic budgets, clear accountability or routine execution, leading to gradual system decline. This led to delayed repairs, customers skipping their bill payments due to poor service, inconsistent water quality, and increasing system downtime. Minor issues such as leakages or pump inefficiencies were not addressed early, and gradually escalated into major failures.

Second, we observed that local entrepreneurs-turned-operators were assigned every responsibility. These implementers, who often received helpful but insufficient classroom training, were left to manage everything, such as revenue collection, daily operations, water quality monitoring and repairs, and customer complaints. Without continuous support and clear systems, this often led to inconsistent service, delayed repairs and gradual system deterioration.

From our observations, we found that the missing elements of these water systems often involved continued on-the-job support, simple operational systems and clear performance routines. Without these tools, operators struggled to translate training into standard and consistent practice of service delivery.

Additionally, community engagement — a key aspect of maintaining a successful water system in areas that are unaccustomed to these services — was treated as a one-time activity, rather than something built through consistent service reliability. We found that engagement typically focused on initial mobilisation, where community leaders helped amplify key messages, but it was not always sustained in a structured way once operations began. This created a gap between initial expectations and actual service delivery. When service was inconsistent or issues were not resolved promptly, users gradually lost trust in the system.

In running our own early pilots, we found that a lack of community engagement led to lower willingness to pay, reduced usage of the service, and in some cases a return to previous water sources, such as contaminated wells and rivers. As trust declined, so did willingness to pay, further reducing the resources available for maintenance. Over time, this weakened financial viability and reduced the accountability for maintaining service standards. Learning from our mistakes, we worked to develop a stronger system. We found that trust and engagement were only sustained when communities experienced reliable, responsive service on an ongoing basis.

Our early assumptions — and where they failed

When we began building our rural water utility, we were not immune to a number of assumptions. We believed that:

• Communities would quickly accept paying for potable water;
• Affordability studies would translate cleanly into tariff compliance; and
• Donor expectations were in line with community needs

Reality challenged all three.

In the early phase, resistance to paying for water was strong. The prevailing belief was simple: “Water is free!” Even when households valued safe water, converting that value into consistent payment required more than logic or awareness. We went door-to-door to explain the value of our services to customers, tailoring our communication to the audience. Still, locals remained sceptical, only gaining interest after observing that others in their community were receiving consistent, safe water delivery.

Tariff collection also proved more complex than anticipated, especially in low-income settings with irregular cash flow. Affordability studies we conducted prior to designing the scheme indicated that households could and would pay the proposed tariff. Yet compliance remained inconsistent. What the studies did not capture was the social complexity of collection: The fact that operators lived within the communities they served made the enforcement of overdue accounts personally and socially costly. And when one household defaulted without consequence, others followed. Piped water schemes cannot simply shift their customer base when customers refuse to pay, and our limited staff capacity made timely follow-up on overdue accounts difficult. Meanwhile, the lean staffing inherent to wide-coverage operations like ours made it structurally difficult to sustain the follow-up required to prevent customer default.

Max TapWater is funded through a blended finance model, and donor expectations added further tension, as reporting often centred on systems installed rather than services reliably delivered. In practice, donors tracked KPIs that were either premature or disconnected from operational reality. For instance, we were asked how many organisations had replicated our model — a question that may be relevant five years into a programme, but that wasn’t realistic while we were still stabilising our first systems. We were also pressed on whether revenues had recovered the capital cost of infrastructure. This payback calculation for community water enterprises required far deeper financial modelling than the reporting framework allowed. These expectations created pressure at exactly the wrong moment, diverting attention from the operational work that would actually determine long-term sustainability. Additionally, operations and maintenance received little strategic attention, and donors were more accustomed to project delivery than utility governance, and rarely anticipated the long-term consequences of this gap.

The pivots that changed everything

What eventually worked was not a single innovation but a series of deliberate shifts in how we designed and ran the system:

• Flexible, service-focused pricing: We moved away from affordability surveys and instead used a service-based pricing model to set our rates. We developed a tiered tariff structure based on household size, rather than a single flat rate for all users, to better reflect expected water consumption and improve perceived fairness. This redesigned pricing used a unit economics model that explicitly accounted for electricity, direct labour and maintenance (routine service and repair) costs, while allowing some margin to fund ongoing monitoring, staffing and governance. This ensured that day-to-day operations and maintenance were financially covered, reducing reliance on external funding and enabling consistent service delivery. This pricing model was paired with clear communication about how our service’s reliability and quality met WHO standards for drinking water quality, reframing payment as a value exchange rather than a fee. Instead of presenting tariffs as a charge for access, we communicated what households were receiving in return: reliable daily supply, reduced time and effort in water collection, improved health outcomes (i.e., minimizing exposure to water-borne diseases) and responsive maintenance support. This shifted user perception: Rather than paying for water, they were paying for an essential service and improved standard of living.
• Governance as infrastructure: We treated governance requirements as operational infrastructure rather than an institutional formality. We established clear accountability for service uptime, water quality and customer response. Through explicit role clarity and robust systems, we were able to reduce downtime and increase service quality. We assigned dedicated technicians for routine maintenance and rapid fault response, supported by a roster of service providers and a structured fault-reporting system. In parallel, we established consultation guidelines and delegated financial authority at the field level, reducing bureaucratic delays in decision-making and enabling faster repairs. This combination of clear ownership, structured reporting and decentralised decision-making led to fewer service interruptions and greater adherence to quality standards.
• Trust built through reliability, not awareness campaigns: Community trust did not come from workshops or awareness campaigns. It came from water flowing consistently, day and night. Once households experienced 24/7 safe water, behaviour changed. Payment compliance improved and complaints became more constructive; reliability proved to be the most effective way to build trust.

Practical lessons for other practitioners in rural water access

One of the most important lessons we learned is that sustainability is not a strategy statement.

It’s an operational discipline built through pricing realism, governance alignment, effective maintenance routines and delegating financial authority at the field level.

Academic business models and financial projections were useful at first, but they failed during implementation, as they were detached from how people actually interacted with the system. Sustainability was only achievable when unit economics, governance and field execution were aligned. To our surprise, the key to sustainability was consistent execution rather than untested innovations.

Our experience also highlighted some other key lessons for entrepreneurs, NGOs and donors working in rural water and similar service sectors:

• Design fee structures for operations, not optics: Both under-pricing and over-pricing erode trust.
• Build operations and maintenance systems before scaling: Expansion magnifies weaknesses faster than strengths.
• Treat governance as core infrastructure: Clear accountability prevents silent system decay.
• Earn trust through reliability, not persuasion: Service quality changes behaviour more than communication messages.
• Measure uptime, not installations: What gets measured gets maintained.
• Accept slower early growth for long-term viability: Sustainability rarely scales at the speed donors expect.
• Sustainability is a holistic approach: Sustainability needs to be addressed not only from the enterprise perspective, but also from the ecosystem perspective.

The work of providing safe, reliable water is a continuous journey. Systems evolve, communities change and infrastructure ages. But our experience reinforced a simple truth: Water systems last only as long as the operational discipline behind them.

If the sector is serious about sustainability, it must commit to building the systems that keep services running long after the initial infrastructure project ends.

Saif Islam is a development and social enterprise professional with over a decade of experience designing, financing and operating water, sanitation and health services in low- and middle-income countries.

Photo credit: Pluca