Episode 10 | From Wells To Water Systems With Water Access Rwanda

Key Moments & Timestamps

0:00 | Introduction

0:18 | Introduction
Host Todd Manwaring introduces Impact Innovations (Episode 10) and welcomes Christelle Kwizera, founder and CEO of Water Access Rwanda, an organization delivering safe, piped water to underserved communities across Rwanda.

1:29 | Meet Christelle Kwizera
Christelle shares her background growing up in Rwanda, the influence of parents working in agriculture and health, and how her early passion for solving real-world problems shaped her path as a social entrepreneur.

4:10 | The Spark: From a Summer Project to a Mission
A conversation about how she would use $60,000 leads Christelle to explore solutions that create jobs and address urgent needs—setting the foundation for Water Access Rwanda.

5:38 | The Water Crisis That Changed Everything
A tragic story of people being killed by crocodiles while fetching water exposes deeper systemic failures and prompts a central question: why families are forced to risk their lives for water.

8:42 | Discovering the Scale of the Problem
Research reveals that lack of piped, safe water is not an isolated issue but a widespread challenge across Rwanda and Africa—fueling Christelle’s commitment to tackle the problem at scale.

12:09 | Rethinking Water: Safe vs. Clean
Christelle explains why “clean-looking” water isn’t enough, emphasizing the need for treated, continuously protected water that remains safe all the way to consumption. An overview of WAR’s two core solutions: Inuma, a community-scale water mini-grid delivering affordable piped water, and Amazi, a rain-to-tap system reducing outages and costs in urban areas.

19:20 | Why Most Water Projects Fail Over Time
Christelle outlines the dangers of “build-and-leave” approaches, sharing findings from abandoned and contaminated boreholes—and how WAR prioritizes monitoring, maintenance, and real user accountability.

31:57 | What Changes When Water Comes Home
Through data and personal stories, Christelle shows how home water connections reduce disease, save time and money, unlock women’s economic opportunity, and increase gender equity within households.

45:15 | Final Reflections: What Effective Water Philanthropy Looks Like
Todd closes the episode by summarizing the evidence behind Water Access Rwanda’s impact, highlighting the importance of purification, testing, and household delivery—and challenging listeners to support water solutions that go beyond wells to truly save lives.

Episode Transcript

Christelle Kwizera - When I say a problem is big and exciting, people might get it wrong. But it's not being excited that people don't have water. It's realizing that there is something so simple missing that I actually know how to solve.

Todd Manwaring- Welcome to the Impact Innovations Podcast presented by Fierce Philanthropy, where we help you become a more impactful philanthropist. We're thankful for the production sponsorship by UI Charitable. This is episode 10. I'm your host, Todd Manwaring.

You just heard a short clip from our conversation where Christelle Kwizera, founder and CEO of Water Access Rwanda, talks about their solution to bringing clean water to hundreds of thousands of rural Rwandans.

During our discussion, notice how similar their solution is to the solution that you rely on for access to safe, clean water. The difference, of course, is that they are doing this in an area where access to potable water was lacking until Water Access for Rwanda arrived and provided good water to hundreds of thousands of people. Later, after the interview, we will dive into how you can support efforts like Water Access Rwanda. Now, let's join the interview.

Hello everyone, this is Todd Manwaring. I'm your host today for the Impact Innovations Podcast. We're very excited to have Christelle Kwizera with us, who runs Water Access Rwanda, a fantastic organization that's bringing water access directly to people and has worked on a number of studies proofing and showing that this is actually benefiting people. So welcome, Christelle, to our program.

Christelle Kwizera- Thank you for having me Todd.

Todd Manwaring- Yeah, we're excited. Tell us a little bit about your story. I noticed that this is something you started early in your career. Tell us about who you are and why this is the thing that you got interested in working on.

Christelle Kwizera- Thank you. I was a college student 11 years ago when I decided to found Water Access Rwanda. And as you rightly say, it's been my full time since college and even during college. And it's where I've made most of my experience. 

So growing up, I was very much into bringing solutions. So I was much inspired by my dad who worked in agriculture and my mom who worked in the health field. So it was kind of this conjunction of people who were always talking about and addressing people's needs in the most basic ways. 

So from a very early age, I had this passion to be a do-gooder, like to do good for my society, for my community. But then I also had quite a bit of an issue with some of the NGO practices I saw around me. 

So I always knew I wanted to do something good for people, but I didn't think I necessarily wanted to be in an NGO or work for an NGO. So in college when the opportunity came to summer projects, so more like short-term initiatives where you kind of make an impact but it doesn't become like an ongoing thing. I actually took them on a lot of time. So every summer I had a project. I worked on environmental issues, I worked on period health, menstrual health, I worked on other initiatives of youth employment and take up skilling of other students and I was doing this before I turned even 19.

When I came to found Water Access Rwanda it was within that environment where I was active in so many initiatives and trying to just do good anywhere I could. And the president of the university I was going to called me for coffee. So we sat down to have coffee and he told me, Christelle, if you had $60,000, what would you do with it? And in my head, it just started firing off, “what do I need to do this summer?” because this is more money than I've dealt on a project before. so I went thinking, “what is something I could do?” 

And at the time being a young Rwandan student in the US, I was very much aware that the opportunities I was exposed to in terms of employment and career after university were much more abundant than what I was hearing from my friends back home. 

So there was a very clear issue of youth unemployment and underemployment. So I wanted to do something that would create jobs and create good jobs for other young people. So that was really my passion at the time. But I didn't know how to actually do that within a project that I run. 

So I went online looking for ideas and one of the first things I did back then because I was outside of Rwanda was always open the news and read what's happening in the country. And one of the first articles that caught my attention was one talking about residents of people who live near Lake Wirira. 

This is a part of Rwanda where there’s these lakes that get flooded during the rain season sometimes. And when they get flooded, they connect to a nearby river, Kadera River, which is full of all kinds of wildlife, including crocodiles. So sometimes the crocodiles migrate from the rivers and get into the lakes. So this story was about how these crocodiles were now in the lakes and were killing people who went to fetch water.

So the more I thought about it, the more the story felt was revealing much to me. One, why were they getting water from a lake in the first place? And then two, how people were perceiving the value of their life as residents of that area versus a crocodile, which is an environmentally protected species because we're trying to protect the environment, it brings in tourism revenue and so on. 

So the punishment if you killed the crocodile was about a million francs. But the money you got from the government if you died, I mean, your family gets this money to help you with the funeral. So that was 300,000. So people were complaining and at the time I was working on issues of environmental justice with the fellowship with the Sierra Club. So that really struck me of how two different policies were clashing and making human life seem somehow less valuable than nature. 

So I was like, okay, here’s something that needs to be fixed. And the question kept popping in my head, why are they going to the lake for water in the first place? And going back into my journey, I didn't grow up rich. My family worked and slowly rose to middle class level. But I do remember as a kid, especially with the situation in Rwanda, the refugee situation, the post genocide society, we didn't have water. So I remember as a kid having to fetch water. But I also remember around eight years old, my family moved to a nicer place and we finally had piped water. And I remembered the journeys to go fetch water stopped.

Todd Manwaring - Oh it was actually piped into the place you were living?

Christelle Kwizera - Yes, we actually had piped water into our home. And the journey stopped and in my naive head or just experiential learning growing up, I thought everyone in Rwanda went through the same process. I actually had no idea how rare piped water still was for most people in Rwanda and most people in Africa.

So I started researching why these people don’t have water and why they are having to go to the lake. I really thought at first this was one of the last villages to get access to a safe water source. Then when I started looking at the data, doing the research to build the proposal of what we could do for them, I started realizing that this wasn't a problem of that one village, this was a massive problem across Rwanda, across Africa.

And being a problem solver, the more I worked into it, the more I fell in love with just how massive the problem was, how many inefficient solutions there were. Because I finally felt like it was utilizing all my brain cells. It actually felt like this is a problem that I can spend everything that I know, like try to mobilize as much resources as possible to try to solve the water crisis. 

I don't know, as a social entrepreneur when I say a problem is big and exciting, people might get it wrong. But it's not being excited that people don't have water, it's realizing that there is something so simple missing that I actually know how to provide and I can actually solve a problem for somebody.

So I got really excited and what started off as a summer project turned into a full-time business now employing 135 people.

Todd Manwaring- That's really exciting. And I can hear what you're saying because in many ways, I think for all of us involved in the social impact space, it brings us a lot of energy working and helping others. And describing that difference of, yes, I'm excited going to work, I'm excited for what I do. Yet there's this problem that's hurting people and that's what I'm trying to alleviate. Yeah, you described that really well.

Christelle Kwizera- And the fact that it's affecting so many people provides a lot of motivation in the sense of urgency to do it now, to do as much as we can now without pushing things into the future.

Todd Manwaring- We often help people understand that in many ways, part of the biggest competitor with activities is what are they used to? And boy, if what we've done all our life is get water from that lake, then that's what I'm going to keep doing. Because that's what's happened for generations. If I get water from this well, then that's what I'm going to keep doing.

I appreciate how your Water Access Rwanda is bringing something different to people. Tell us a little bit about some of the different kinds of ways that you're connecting water and maybe explain too that this water isn't just, yeah, we're digging a well and providing it to people, but we're actually making sure that the water is clean, that it is good water.

And help us understand the various ways this gets connected into people's lives through these access points, but also through the piped water that you're working on.

Christelle Kwizera- Yeah, so Water Access Rwanda has a very simple vision of safe water at the turn of the tap. And that kind of sees what we need to do, but it also disqualifies a lot of other, let's say traditional approaches to how water is provided. So we really focus on enabling piped water that is safe to drink. And when we talk about safety within the water space, it's different from clean.

So you can have clean water which looks clean and might be safe to consume, but if it's not being protected from further contamination, it's water that you can't necessarily drink safely and trust to be potable. So we're really focused on water that is not only treated but remains safe up to the point that it's being consumed by a person without needing any further treatment. To deliver that, we have a few solutions.

One that is very famous and known by many people, it's called Inuma. It's a safe water mini-grid. So a lot of people have heard of mini-grids in the solar space. So this is the mini-grid for water. To deliver it, we drill boreholes, we pump water, we filter the water, and we pump it to an elevated storage and distribute it across pipelines within the community. And once we do that the user community has the option to walk up to one public kiosk we put inside their community or to connect to one of our pipelines for private access into their homes.

Maybe to give you a scale of the idea, a mini grid is about one square kilometer, in terms of surface that it covers. In Rwanda it's more of like one village. So it's on a village level about 1,500 to a maximum of 3,000 users. So it's a water system where if two neighboring villages both use our system, if something happens to one village it doesn't mean the whole area is out of water. 

So it can really allow for much more reliability. It allows for more control on the safety of the water. So we know the water leaving our treatment plant is fully treated, but we also know once it reaches the ends of the mini-grid, still safe to drink and contains usually enough chlorine to where if further contamination is introduced, the water will still remain safe.

So that's the Inuma and it's, let's say, a technological marvel, but built on simplicity. So everything we use is quite simple, especially given that it is a mini-grid. So we're not doing anything too complex. It's water pumping, it's water storage, it's water purification, and the material we use is designed to work on like three to six cubic meters per hour, which is not very high-tech infrastructure. 

So it's quite simple. Some people will have similar filtration devices on a household level, for example, but we can apply it on a community level as well. So this ensures that the ongoing cost of maintenance is quite affordable and easy to do without specialized knowledge from a technician.

And this water is quite cheap, so we sell it currently, one dollar gets you 1,500 liters. So it's safe enough that you can drink it, but it's cheap enough that you should use it for everything. So shower with it, wash your vegetables with, cook with it, anything people want to do really.

Also, showering with safe water is quite important because when we think about waterborne diseases, most people think of diarrhea, but skin diseases, even things like malaria are all tied to water in some ways. So making sure that people have access to safe water reduces all these other challenges.

So that's our star product. It's currently serving over 150,000 users across Rwanda, mainly in the eastern part of the country. And then we have this other product, which is called Amazi. Amazi literally means water in Kenya Rwanda. So we're not very good at naming. 

It's a rain to tap water system. So Rwanda gets a lot of rain every year. We realized it's always raining on our roofs, but people are always out of water. Rwandans love to use Twitter. So that's where we got to complain about any lack of service delivery from the government or from different companies. So in 2020, you would log on Twitter and that was during COVID and you see everyone is saying, “I'm out of water. What's happening?” You know, they're all bashing the state utility. Like, “why don't we have water?”

And it shocked me at the time, again one of those moments where you notice a gap. It's raining cats and dogs. Like it was raining so heavily that it was flooding the city. But then everyone in the city was complaining they didn't have water. So what's missing there is simple technology to allow for people to harvest the rainwater.

So in 2021, that's when we launched Amazi. And with it, we've now served, I think we're reaching a bit over 500 premises. Some of them are schools, some of them are households, some of them are restaurants. And when they get our system, they no longer need to buy city water for most of the year. So they usually only buy it for like two months out of 12 months in the year, which means savings. 

So most of our households save 58% of their water bills despite paying for our system. And then they also reduce their water outage days to literally zero. So we see a lot of impact with that product from saving water. What we haven't measured yet is how much of a catchment impact it's having that we've actually succeeded in reducing the amount of flooding.

But what we've seen with our users is if somebody used to have maybe a two cubic meter water tank, they've switched to now 10 cubic meter. So the more they see the rainwater is useful, the more of it they want to harvest. And our system allows our users to make more use of their rainwater, which means storing more, being greedy for rainwater, let's say. So yeah, those are the main products we have.

Running this is a whole team of technicians on the production side, a water quality team that ensures all this water is up to standard. And when we talk about being up to standard, that includes regular testing because you can never be too sure. 

So one of the key gaps within the water sector right now is a lot of systems are built well on the opening day. So the day they're opened, everything works, the water is safe to consume, but no one is monitoring what happens a year later, two years later. And that means if the water got contaminated at any point, people can be drinking unsafe water, still thinking it's safe. It also means if something breaks, somewhere in a donor report or in a government office, somebody is still seeing that community as being covered when really they've went back to whatever they used to do before the system was there because it's now broken. 

So our approach is very much conservative on the fact that we only report users that we have confirmed to still be active users. So instead of saying like this system is serving a village of 5,000 people, every year we actually go to all of these users and ask them do you use our water and if they reply no we don't count them as users, if they use it we count them as users. 

That also means on a technical level that we always repair on a preventative level so we do preventive maintenance and then when something breaks we also react very quickly.

So actually within a third party assessment we had done we saw that we take an average six hours to resolve any water outage which is quite good. But also we saw we have a higher number of outages than what people perceived competition was providing as well. So that's something that we're gonna work on improving. We try to hold ourselves accountable to a really high standard of water that is super reliable, that is super safe, and also very affordable. 

And to make sure we really hit that affordability part, which if you allow me, I'll share a bit about why affordability is a bit different in Africa. Currently, the money that utilities collect in Africa for water only covers 65% of their cost.

Todd Manwaring- Where do the other funds come from then?

Christelle Kwizera- Well, it's reliance on subsidy and government and grants and just failing. A lot of utilities in Africa have failed. So they're in a space where they're actually not making enough money to cover their own costs, but Africans paid the most for their water.

And this is if you adjust for the income of the population. So given what people make, they pay a much higher percent of their income to get access to safe water. So you end up in a situation where if you raise the tariff for the utilities to cover their expenses, the water is no longer affordable for the target user. But at the same time, you need to fix the financing gap in the sector and you need to make sure that utilities can actually make money and you know be profitable and actually invest in growing the still lacking water infrastructure. 

So what we've done as Water Access Rwanda is rely a lot on carbon credits. We see a typical family that uses our water point. They no longer need to boil the water because the water is safe. And this results in saving about four tons of carbon emission every year. And to put it into perspective, it's the same emission as one car driving for a usual commute, you know, back and forth from work and home, per year. So that's also how much a family emits per year just from cutting down trees to boil water. 

Todd Manwaring - Just from that activity?

Christelle Kwizera - Yes, so we're able to help them stop having to do that. And then we account that into carbon credits, which we then sell. And that money is used to make sure that our water sales can actually be profitable and allow us to keep reinvesting into building more water infrastructure.

Todd Manwaring- Right? You know, one thing that I think is interesting, when we were researching your organization, and I'm hearing you describe this a lot more as we're digging into this and hearing what you're doing, there's often an approach that I see with charities in the United States or certainly in some other countries as well, when they think of something like water in another country, when they think about food, when they think about something, they often think a bit too simplistically. And in some ways, you were kind of describing, “I want to do this differently than the NGOs do this.”

For instance, there's a lot of groups. I was just talking to someone yesterday who said, “yeah, what we've done is in this area in Ghana, we've gone and dug boreholes. And we're providing water for people.” And I just asked the thing that you mentioned. So did that ever get tested? Are you testing it still? How do you ensure that the water is safe at the point where people are getting it? And he said, “no, it's clean. And people are excited that they don't have to go as far away to get water. And so we're saving them time.”

But I thought it was quite interesting. They actually had never tested the water. They just looked at, thinking it's clear. But they have no idea if there's some kind of contamination or on the other hand, what I expect in my home is that tap water to come in and be safe. And that the group providing that water is doing that testing, just like you said, right? That they're testing it regularly, there's a correct amount of filtration and chlorine. And that's exactly what you're providing is that same kind of service.

Christelle Kwizera- Exactly, and maybe to add to what you're saying, in 2017 we started a project where we were trying to recover and reclaim a managed water project- all boreholes that had been drilled in the country which had no one to manage.

And we mapped 700 plus of them, which were around the country. And about 350 were completely broken, so they no longer provided any water. So we took some of them so we would repair. And when we tested the water, we found it to be so bad, not just for bacterial contamination, but some of it had hard metals.

People use them because they have no other choice, but the iron and manganese make the water hard to use for most things, and it also tastes bad. But we also found some boreholes that had very dangerous contaminants, like barium.

Which if consumed for a very long time will actually lead to heart disease. We found boreholes that contained even arsenic, which that's a direct poison. We see things like high levels of lead which over time, the more you're consuming it, you will have kidney issues. 

So you find sometimes it's like we're providing a solution but if it's not being properly managed and often that those kinds of projects ignore national standards. So for example, I'm familiar with Rwanda national standards, but also know even Ghana national standards on providing safe water require monthly testing of the water systems. But when you come in into that parachute mode, like I'm gonna come into a project and leave, then no one is gonna hold you accountable to the national standards, which are there to also protect people ensure that if somebody is told this water is safe for you that it is really safe and they can use it without worrying. 

So testing is a must even thinking about the best way to deploy this money. So like a lot of projects we see go drill boreholes and they sometimes drill within areas where a pipe system for example already exists. So they come in already having in mind what we know and want to do is boreholes. But maybe they went in an area where there is a spring fed system that's already there. And maybe that spring fed system is limited in reach because the piping infrastructure needs renewing or they need to extend the piping infrastructure. So we often see within the water world especially that organizations are stuck with the kind of technology they want to do, not the kind of technology that is most appropriate for the people they want to serve.

Todd Manwaring- They have this solution that they just want to provide rather than what's the best thing to do for what's going on.

Christelle Kwizera- And we face that issue a lot. We have a lot of people we've tried to work with. Some of them are able to go back and change their approach to be the most impactful they can be. But we find that there is a lot more not willing to change their approach at all.

So we have people who, for example, will insist on a new water source. So they're like, we raised this money, but for it to work, we need to create a new water source. And you're telling them, I have 100 villages with broken water sources, and the investment is much more reduced. We can serve all those 100 instead of creating 10 new systems. But then they're stuck in how they raise their money, in the story they're telling, which centers what they're doing and not just that progress of the community towards a better water system. 

So instead of seeing water coming out, we want to tell the story of how that water got there. So we want to focus on the big rig drilling and seeing water splash out. We want to focus on the fact that they didn't have water before. Now they have water. Instead of the less sexy story, but being more impactful of they had a public kiosk that they walk to every morning and now they have water at home. I helped them get the pipeline from what was already existing and now they have water.

Organizations want the story of ‘they used to get water from ditches or from lakes or really bad sources.’ And so when you bring them to a community that has to walk two kilometers, but they're still accessing safe water, it's not very obvious to know what story they should tell. You know, it was hard for them to walk, but they weren't really suffering, you know, for water.

Todd Manwaring- That's so interesting. You just mentioned it's because people aren't looking at the end result. They're not really thinking about, ‘I want to make sure that this water is safe, it's getting to people’ and that that's the story I'm telling people. Instead, they're telling people a bit of a savior perspective, ‘I'm going to come save this group by doing this thing. I'm going to dig a well, water is going to come splashing out, children are going to dance in it, I'm going to take a picture.’ Instead of really describing the story of these are the families that now have piping in their home, the water getting into their home is safe, and this is how it's changing their lives.

I'd love to hear you help us understand something. You had talked to me about randomized control trials. I know that you do a lot of A-B testing. You've had third party groups come and assess what's going on and showing the differences of your program from other programs or from other activities in the health space, in the poverty space, maybe even paint a picture. Here's what was happening in the family, but now because this private connection is actually coming into their home, here's what changes from this health perspective, poverty, dealing with gender issues. Help us understand what that looks like for someone.

Christelle Kwizera- Water is very, very impactful. We say water is life, but when you see the different dimensions that easy access to water will have in a person, that's when you really understand that water is life. So I'll use a quick example of a lady we serve in Nyagatare. This is one of the districts we work in. One of those stories where before we came, much like many of our users, she’d found a way to cope with lack of access to safe water. So in Nyagatare this means paying a lot of money to people who cycle long distances. There is this business that has formed of people who use their bicycles to go fetch water for communities. So she used to send for ten jerrycans every day because that's what she needed for her home.

So 10 jerrycans, that's about 200 liters. So it's not very much. By comparison in the US, the average person uses 350 liters per day. So that's barely enough when you think she was using it for all her home.

And that would cost her around $3. So it's very costly for her and even then she didn't trust where the water was coming from. So these guys on bicycles, they can either go to a safe source or they can go to an unsafe one. So even after the water reaches her, she still has to strain it and then the one she's gonna use for personal consumption for sharing, she also has to treat it. 

So when we came into her community, she was quite interested and impressed. And she was one of the first people who told us, I want this water in my home. So when we told her it was going to be a possibility, she was very, very excited. Our approach is usually we start with the public kiosk while we develop the rest of the pipeline.

So already when the kiosk was there, it meant instead of sending somebody else to go fetch water for her and pay a lot of money for it, her 10 jerrycans went from $3 to just 20 cents and the distance to get water reduced from the kilometers these guys were riding to just a 15-minute walk. And when I say 15 minutes, I mean the time from her home to the kiosk, the wait time at the kiosk, and then back to her home. 

Todd Manwaring- That makes so much sense. I mean, huge reduction in cost, huge reduction in the time and knowing that the water she is getting is safe. She doesn't have to worry about filtering it and treating it in this extra work. 

Christelle Kwizera- So once we passed the pipeline in front of her home, she was one of the first to connect. When she counted how many years she's lived in that area without water, that she spent over $1,000 in fetching water, it was a no brainer because she'd spent so much more before and this time around she was gonna spend $200 and then connect to a water source that was much much cheaper and wasn't gonna require any interaction or paying anybody else for accessing safe water. 

So that's one of the stories we see most often. In the case of women and children in rural areas, most of them don't have gainful employment. But it's not because of lack of opportunities, but it's rather they are so burdened by the chores they have at home.

So here I'll talk about another woman called Hadija. Every morning she had to be awake at 3 a.m., rush to the water. But she actually thought that was much safer for her because in the morning there'll be way more people at that spring system. And as she described to me, the people at the spring included very big men, so it would be very scary. So although she was first in line, when they show up she doesn't want to insist that she was there before them. She was always very scared about those encounters so she would wake up much much earlier, run to the spring to try to get enough water for her family. So she recently gave birth right before we moved into the community. And with giving birth means, you know, obviously less energy to actually do that work. So she had to rely on other people to get enough water and increase water demand because babies need a lot of laundry. 

So the first time I visited her, she was really insistent like “don't enter my house with your shoes on. Don't dirty my floor. I don't want to think about putting my water to clean after you guys.” I remember it very very strongly because when we went for one of our monitoring visits, we chose to visit her house and I brought some people in. And as soon as she said, you can come into my house, I was quick to warn them, take off your shoes, you don't want to mess with Hadija and her floor. And as soon as I said that, she was like, “no, no, no, no, no, this time around I have the piped water. Keep your shoes, dirty the floor all you want, it won't take me even one minute to clean after you.” 

So it was this reestablished joy and peace. Before, the Hadija we saw was very anxious, always thinking about water. “Will I get enough today? Will I be able to actually do anything?” Because everything needs water. And then suddenly to being like, “I have it right there. I don't care if I need to use more of it today. It doesn't cost me much and it doesn't really bring me a lot of anxiety.”

So these are some of the stories of transformation that we see. And when you look at it in numbers, we save on average every home 58 minutes per water trip, which depending on how much water they use, that could add up to like two hours or three hours.

We actually did a survey where we asked, especially the women that use our water, what they were using with the saved time. And we found that over 70% had started small businesses. So they started doing something that was earning them money on the side. Some of them actually reselling the water to their neighbors, so that was nice to learn. Some had opened up small shops within their centers. So that was a really nice surprise to find the impact of just giving somebody back the time. Less worry and even saving them that money that they were spending before. 

Another surprise was how much more equal the water task was. So in our baseline surveys, the task of fetching water is a women's task, it's a children's task, no matter how hard and tough it is. Unfortunately, that's how it plays out in the community. And after we come in with the better system that is more convenient, then suddenly it's a shared task, in the majority of cases.

You know, you would never think if you go get a glass of water from the sink, you don't associate that with the gender. So it's kind of the same transformation that happens. While when we think about long journeys to a water point, we all picture this African mother, maybe with a kid in her back and also like a water thing. Like that's the image that we have when water is hard to get. And the people who use our water system are experiencing this transformation in real time in how they share tasks at home and how much more gender equality they're experiencing.

Todd Manwaring- So not only are things changing at home with the water usage, the access, the safety, but the way the family's working. And then like you're saying, a lot of these women now have a chance to turn that extra time saving into something that brings more income into the family. What other ways can people help out? What do you explain to people when they connect with you? 

Christelle Kwizera- Yeah, so we're in a very privileged position. We've actually raised quite a lot of money.  So this is one of those few times where I won't be asking for direct money contributions, but more of an indirect way to kind of level the field. I'll try to frame the situation a bit. So right now in sub-Saharan Africa, 700 million people do not have safe water at home. It's a massive number. And up to date, a lot of interventions are still looking at providing that public water access. So there is so little focus on piped water access, it creates a big disparity between the solutions that we're used to bringing versus the solutions that the community wants and is willing to pay for. 

One key thing we've proven time and time again at Water Access Rwanda, is that when the access is there, when it's convenient, people will pay for it. The price matters, of course. People tend to be very price sensitive, depending on how much they earn, but they'll pay the right price  for good service. And that's why we've shown at Water Access Rwanda. We actually have a model where we build the infrastructure and over time from collecting connection fees and from selling water, we can actually make the money back. 

Not just pay for running costs, but actually repay the cost of the infrastructure. And that achieves a financial scalability within the space that most people are not achieving. So a lot of organizations are always looking back at the donors, at the government, as always being the ones to build the infrastructure.

And what we are showing is private companies, private money can actually come into the sector and make money and increase infrastructure access.

So there still needs to be a lot of advocacy, a lot of shifting perspective so that people can align around models that actually increase access. So if you're giving me a water system, I should be the one to pay for it over time and sustain my own access.

And I should be the one to tell you, don't give me a hand pump, don't give me a public system, why don't you extend it up to my house?

People want convenience. I'm sure a lot of people listening to us, if you give them a choice today between piped water and the hand pump, they would always go for piped water, right? So there is a no brainer, we all know we need piped water. And maybe to add to that, a lot of people who do water projects are in it for the health impact.

And water has a huge connection to health. We see within our project that the disease burden reduces quite a lot, since most diseases are tied to waterborne diseases and diarrhea and so on, which also feeds malnutrition. It's a whole mess. And so most people going to the water sector interested, not just for the infrastructure development piece, but the health piece.

And there was actually recently a first of its study that showed that proximity to water and not water safety was the driver for reduced mortality or for increased lifespan. So that's something I would interest anyone who is listening, is to really look into that because it changes that while we're looking at reducing mortality? 

Is it would I provide water even if unsafe but in convenient way? Or would I provide safe water but really far from the home? And that study was very clear that you need to provide it near the home because the cost of that walk, the hardship of walking for that water actually has a much more negative impact on our lifespan than the safety of the water. 

I invite your listeners to keep up with us on our YouTube channel. We post a lot of user testimonials on our website whenever we have big announcements and the impact report or an annual report. Otherwise, just think about the water sector differently and encourage more long-term piped water initiatives.

Todd Manwaring- I appreciate you describing that. That makes so much sense. Thanks for clarifying that Christelle and thanks for being with us today and joining us as we have this discussion.

Christelle Kwizera- Thank you, Todd.

Todd Manwaring- You just heard from Christelle Kwizera, founder and CEO of Water Access Rwanda. They are addressing a crucial problem in Rwanda, access to potable water. Due to their success, you heard Christelle mention that they're not in need of funds, but that our focus could be on bringing safe, clean water everywhere. Here's the problem.

One in four people in our world lack access to safely managed water. Safely managed water means water that is on premises, available when needed, and free from contamination. One in six must find this potable water outside of their home, a burden that falls primarily on women and girls. An estimated 250 million hours are spent bringing water back to home.

A deep issue is waterborne illness because some of this water is not free from contamination. And waterborne illness becomes and is the leading cause of death in children under five.

Here's the solution. In a 2024 study on Water Access Rwanda found that their Inuma water grid has led statistically significant reduction in waterborne diseases. For every 300 households in a community using their grid system, 100 cases of waterborne illnesses are prevented every three months. 300 cases every nine months, 400 every year.

During that same study period, 93% of Inuma water grid households reported no water-related illness compared to 59% in non-Inuma grid areas. What does the water grid do? One, it accesses and gathers water. Two, it purifies the water and continually tests it. Three, It distributes the water directly to people's homes via pipe. 

If you are funding an organization or supporting an organization that says that they are bringing clean water to people, then get involved enough and make sure that they follow these same three steps. Unfortunately, we often get very excited seeing water come out of a well, but that's just the first step.

If we don't make sure that the water is purified, that's our first mistake. Not working to bring that water into people's homes is our second.

Thank you for joining us for the Impact Innovations Podcast. I hope today's conversation inspires you to approach philanthropy with greater intention, strategy, and effectiveness in a way that you can feel confident that you are truly making a difference. Please subscribe to our podcast and leave a review on Apple podcasts and Spotify, and share this with others you know are interested in finding great organizations to support. This helps our podcast grow. 

To continue the conversation on grant making, impact investing, or impact measurement, or to support one of the high impact organizations that we highlight, go to our website at fiercephilanthropy.org. You can also connect to me directly at podcast@fiercephilanthropy.org.

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