Fairaction’s solar-powered borehole being used by the local community in Nigeria. Photo: Supplied.
Billions of dollars have been donated to building water infrastructure. Why haven’t those donations reduced the number of people living without clean water?
Without proper scrutiny of the solutions we’re funding, our charitable donations might be making the problems worse.
For example, a solution to extreme water poverty often means digging a well or borehole. This is then left to the community to maintain, without thinking about what happens when a tap breaks or a fresh filter is needed.
Seeking to understand the dynamics that create these situations, PhD student and chief executive officer of Australian water charity Fairaction International Samuel Adeoti set out on a data-gathering trip to his birth country, Nigeria.
What he found was a recurring story: unsustainable solutions have real-life consequences.
The water poverty cycle
Samuel Adeoti
Take the Nigerian Bara community as an example.
A well-meaning charity with a mission to help communities suffering from extreme water poverty installed a hand pump borehole. It was a welcome solution at the time and it improved health outcomes.
Three years later, the borehole broke. Without the financial resources or skilled technicians to fix it, the community was faced with either dehydration or drinking contaminated water from the stream they used before the borehole.
But in that three years, the stream had become even more dangerous.“The stream was abandoned for so long and overgrown with vegetation and used more frequently by animals,” says Samuel.
“Children under three years old hadn’t been exposed to drinking dirty water from the stream, so their natural immunity was weak. As a result, many children and adults died from water-related diseases.”
This horrifying discovery led to a simple rule that underlies Samuel’s approach to his organisation and PhD:
If it's not going to be sustainable, it's not the solution and you should not do it.
Differing definitions of sustainability
But what does sustainability mean? Good for the environment? Cost effective? Climate-friendly?
It’s all those things according to Samuel, but only if first, basic human needs are met.
For the millions of people who don’t have access to clean drinking water, sustainability sounds like: will the tap to our clean water source break? If it breaks, where does the money come from to fix it? And who has the skills to do so?
“From where I stand, I represent the 800 million people in the world who don't have drinking water and those who probably won’t have access to it in the near future because of climate change,” explains Samuel.
“But defining sustainability for Nigeria needs to be different to that of Kenya, Canada or Australia because providing sustainable access to clean drinking water is an immensely complex and diverse problem.”
Data-driven road to sustainable water infrastructure
Fairaction International's mission is to provide sustainable access to safe and affordable drinking water for everyone, everywhere, starting with Nigeria.
“I'm trying to find the solution to the high failure rate of water infrastructure in places with water poverty. Because if we can solve the problem of failed water infrastructure, all we will need is a one-off injection of money.”
In the hunt for a solution, Samuel and Fairaction built a solar-powered borehole with a smart water kiosk that can monitor functionality in real-time. But it’s not yet 100 per cent self-sufficient.
The development of a self-sufficient or sustainable solution takes considerable iteration. Samuel turned to UTS to fast track the process and discovered the Industry Doctorate Program.
Through the program, Samuel is pursuing real-world research as a partnership between Fairaction and UTS.
“Only a year into my PhD, I’ve managed to understand the problem far better than before.”
- Samuel Adeoti
Surprising role of mathematics in sustainability
Leaning on his previous study in advanced mathematics, Samuel has developed a sustainability rating that he uses to determine how self-sufficient a solution is. The closer a rating is to 100 per cent, the more likely that a community can maintain it.
Opening of the solar-powered borehole in Nigeria. Photo supplied.
“The number one thing mathematics can do for anyone is develop their ability to think critically and understand complex situations. Calculus is a complex problem and society has complex problems.
“So, when you're dealing with a problem like water poverty, it incorporates different factors: political, social, financial, economic and environmental. As a mathematician with the capability to understand a broad range of problems, I can help solve it.”
The next step in Samuel’s plans for providing clean water to all humans is to develop a sustainability framework.
“There's a lot of factors that we need to reverse engineer when we think about sustainability. For example, when we consulted in Nigeria, we found that people don’t mind paying an affordable amount for clean drinking water,” he explains.
“A sustainability framework will look at all the problems that have been identified and create a process that would consider those problems in the solution. It will create the process that should be followed so that each problem that you could imagine a country would have can be solved.”
Over to you
Once this sustainability framework is finalised, Samuel believes it can help all of us – not just governments and NGOs – to ensure that our aid and donations are contributing to more effective interventions.
Because our charitable donations aren’t just about end of year financial reporting. Our well-meaning help can have real consequences if it’s invested in unsustainable solutions.
→ Find out what problem you could solve with a UTS Industry Doctorate
