When Water Projects Optimise for the Wrong Goal

Before anything is built, a proper pre-construction assessment works out whether a service can actually endure in this community: the reliability of the water resource, the real demand for it, the financial model that will fund its upkeep, and the governance and ownership that will keep it running once the contractors have gone. Then comes durable construction built to last for decades rather than a few years, and the monitoring and maintenance that keep water flowing long after the launch.

The trouble is that the sector measures none of it. Not the diagnosis, not the durability, not the monitoring. So on paper, the cheaper option still wins. And it keeps being chosen, because the sector is answering the wrong question: how many water points can we install?

If the goal is to deliver water points within a funding cycle, then ten cheap boreholes beat one durable system every time. Given that goal, the cheaper option is the optimal choice. Decision-makers are simply doing what the incentives, the reporting templates, and the funding cycles reward. As the economist Herbert Simon showed, people do not respond to the world as it really is. They respond to the world as it is measured for them.[1] And in the water sector, the metrics are the number of water points installed, the number of communities reached, and the number of people impacted within a financial year. Every one of them rewards building fast and cheap, and not one asks whether the water will still be flowing a year later. So installation is what the sector produces.

The problem, then, is not the solution. It is the goal.

This is where systems thinking earns its keep. Donella Meadows, who spent her career studying how to change complex systems, showed that a system's goal is one of the most powerful levers there is. She also warned of a common trap she called seeking the wrong goal. A system, she argued, does not produce what we hope for. It produces what it is designed, funded, measured, and rewarded to produce. Set the goal badly, and the system will chase it with great efficiency and still leave us worse off.[2]

The water sector, with the best of intentions, has made infrastructure delivery its goal. So infrastructure delivery is what it produces. We count boreholes drilled, so the system produces boreholes. We count people reached, so it produces big beneficiary numbers. We count money spent, so it produces spending. Economists have a name for this, Goodhart's law: when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure.[3] Installation was only ever a stand-in for water. We turned the stand-in into the goal, and now the sector chases it while the water itself quietly disappears.

You can see the result across the region, and it is stark.

This is no accident. It is a system doing exactly what it was built to do: producing assets that exist, not services that endure.

The sector keeps confusing two different things: delivering infrastructure and delivering a service.

The global goal already draws this line, even if our metrics do not. SDG 6.1 does not ask for water points; it asks for universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water.[7] The WHO and UNICEF go further, defining safely managed water as water that is on premises, available when needed, and free from contamination.[8] Every word of that describes a service experienced over time, not an asset installed on a day.

Most water projects fail because they stop planning at the wrong moment. The project cycle ends at construction; the community's life with the water begins there. From that day on, someone has to handle breakdowns, spare parts, operators, tariff collection, water quality, energy costs, governance, and accountability.[9]

When a community will not pay for or maintain a pump, this is often blamed on the people themselves. More often it is a problem of coordination and trust, the kind Elinor Ostrom showed can be solved with good local institutions rather than wished away.[10] Keeping water flowing means handling all of this, year after year.

Demand cannot be assumed either. Our research on underutilisation in a water-poor Nigerian community found that availability alone did not translate into use.[11]

Demand, proximity, and trust are not soft considerations to be tidied up after commissioning. They belong in the pre-construction assessment, alongside hydrogeology and finance.

A project that installs a pump but plans for none of it has not delivered a water service. It has delivered a pump that is already counting down to the day it fails.

The same wrong goal also leads organisations to undo one another's work. Because each actor is judged by its own installation count, projects go ahead without checking whether a community is already served, and the result is a problem our research was the first to document: aid overlap.[12]

The answer is coordination by design: a shared framework that shows water actors where provision already exists before they build, so a new effort reinforces the system instead of collapsing it. That is the gap our Target 6.1 platform was built to close.[13]

Optimising for the wrong goal does not only waste resources. It harms the very people it was meant to help.

In Fairaction's research, drawn from the lived experience of more than a million people, we saw the same story again and again. A borehole arrives, life improves, and the project is logged as a success. Within a few years the pump falls silent, and an asset is left with nothing behind it to keep it alive.[5]

In communities like Bara, where the only alternative is a distant, contaminated stream, the abandoned source grows more dangerous while the pump works. Women and girls walk for hours again. Children drink from water that is no longer safe. People get sick, and some of them die.

So the wrong goal is not a harmless inefficiency. In water, it does not just waste money. It costs people their time, their health, and sometimes their lives.

If the wrong goal produces failure so efficiently, working harder at it will not help. The goal itself has to change, and with it what we measure, fund, and reward.

That one change ripples through everything that follows. Procurement starts to value whole-life cost over the lowest install price. Monitoring starts to value performance over completion photographs. Finance starts to plan for maintenance and replacement instead of treating them as overhead. The sector does not need fewer targets. It needs better ones: whether the water still works, whether it is safe and affordable, how quickly faults are fixed, whether the system pays for itself, and what users actually experience over the years.[11] These are harder to measure than "one borehole installed." They are also far closer to the truth.

This is the goal we build for. We treat water access not as a construction job but as a sustainability problem, engineered for a service life of at least twenty years from the very first decision, with diagnosis before construction and monitoring long after it.[13] And this is not just theory. Our smart water systems report their own performance, and our longest-running site has held 98.7 per cent reliability into its fifth year.[13][14] The durable solution costs more upfront. But it is the only one still delivering water years later, long after the funding has ended and everyone has gone home.

So the real choice was never between one expensive system and ten cheap ones. It was between two goals, and the metrics, incentives, and budgets that follow from each. The cheap solution is not the problem. It is exactly what a system produces when it is aimed at the wrong goal.

At Fairaction, sustainability is not something we assess after a project is completed. It is something we design for from the very beginning. Our approach covers the entire lifecycle of a water system, from pre-construction planning and community engagement, through construction and commissioning, to post-construction monitoring, maintenance and continuous performance assessment.[13]

To see how Fairaction applies this in practice, watch my short video presentation on how we work across the pre-construction, construction, and post-construction stages.

Because sustainable water access is not achieved when construction ends. It is achieved when communities can still rely on safe, affordable water long after everyone else has left.[15]