What Happens After the Water Starts Flowing?

What Happens After the Water Starts Flowing?

Welcome to the Mellow Madness update, a space for thinking out loud about strategy, leadership, and the ideas that shape how we build lives, organisations, and our continent.

This week, Africa and the world are gathering in Kigali for the Africa Water & Sanitation Systems Leadership Symposium. After several months working around safe drinking water programmes in Rwanda, I have found myself thinking about a question that applies to far more than water: what happens after something works?

I have seen the technology work. Through our partnership with International Pure Water (IPW), the Drink Pure Foundation uses advanced purification systems combining pre-filtration, reverse osmosis, nano-purification and UV disinfection. A system can produce up to 6,000 litres of safe drinking water a day. More importantly, independent laboratory testing in Rwanda found microbiological indicators above applicable standards in municipal source water at one deployment; after treatment, all tested microbiological parameters met Rwanda Standards Board drinking-water requirements.

That is powerful technology. But working in schools has taught me that technology becomes truly valuable when a system develops around it.

Someone must assess the water before installation. Someone must prepare the site properly. Operators must be trained. Water quality must be monitored. Equipment must be maintained before it fails. School leadership needs to understand its responsibilities, technicians need clear processes, communities need ownership, and government needs to be part of the architecture if the ambition is eventually to scale.

Those things are not as exciting as the machine itself. They are also much 

harder to photograph.

We tend to celebrate visible interventions. The classroom. The borehole. The computer. The water system. There is usually a launch, a photograph and a moment when everyone can say, “Look what we have done.” But the real test begins afterwards. What happens six months later? Three years later? Who maintains it? Who notices when something is wrong? Does the knowledge remain locally? Can the model be repeated somewhere else?

Our experience in Rwanda has been deliberately built around those questions. We started by learning. Blue Veil Villa helped us validate the technology under real operating conditions. Empower the Future helped refine operations, training and maintenance. GS Rusororo became our public-school proof of concept, while GS Ruhanga allowed us to replicate what we had learned. Each implementation made the next one stronger.

That process has made our relationship with Rwanda’s Ministry of Education particularly meaningful to me. Installing a successful system in one school is an engineering achievement. Creating an approach capable of working across many schools becomes an institutional challenge. Following the period covered by our impact report, the Drink Pure Foundation and MINEDUC signed an MoU establishing a framework for collaboration on future school deployments. 

That is important because sustainable scale requires technology, schools, communities, government and partners to work as parts of the same system.

Perhaps because I come from branding, I recognise the pattern. People see a logo and think they are seeing the brand. They see a campaign and think they 

are seeing the marketing. Yet the visible expression only works because of everything underneath it: strategy, culture, leadership, behaviour, consistency and trust.

Development is not so different.

Africa needs excellent technology. We need infrastructure, investment and innovation. But we also need to become obsessed with what happens after those things arrive. Who owns them? Who maintains them? What systems support them? What knowledge stays behind? And can what worked once become something that works repeatedly?

There is a leadership question hiding in there too. Perhaps one measure of what we build is not simply whether it works while we are standing beside it, but whether it keeps working when we are gone.

The world-class technology from IPW that will be in the water 

production room

That is what these months in Rwanda have reinforced for me. Great technology can solve an enormous problem. Great systems allow that solution to keep solving it.

And sometimes the most important part of the story begins after the water 

starts flowing.

Thank you for reading.

Warm regards,