A Water Charity Spills Its Secrets, and Donors Open Their Wallets

Ned Breslin has spent most of the past two decades working in Africa, and he is tired of well-intentioned philanthropy bringing water to the developing world, only to see people suffer when the pumps break and projects go unused due to neglect and mismanagement by nonprofit groups.

Now Mr. Breslin, the head of Water for People, a global water and sanitation group in Denver, is trying to do something to reverse the track record of failure. His group is seeking to rewire its relationship with donors by sharing information on failures as well as successes, developing technology that provides real-time information on the status of projects, and persuading philanthropists to pay less attention to simple measures like how many people have been reached by a project and more on whether it will still work a decade from now. It’s an approach that he hopes will spread to other nonprofit groups, regardless of their missions—and, while risky, it seems to be playing well with many donors who are migrating to the charity in greater numbers.

Mr. Breslin, who joined Water for People in 2006 and became its chief executive last year, believes efforts to bring clean water and sanitation to poor countries are badly in need of change. In a paper entitled “Rethinking Hydro-Philanthropy,” which he first published on the group’s Web site in January, Mr. Breslin describes Africa, Asia, and Latin America as “wastelands” for broken water pumps, disused toilets, and other malfunctioning water technology.

Part of the reason, he says, is that nonprofits share only happy stories and superficial measurements, but don’t keep tabs on whether the water projects keep working over time—and donors don’t ask.

What little data exists, however, suggests that failures are widespread; the International Institute for Environment and Development, in London, estimates that 50,000 rural water points in Africa are broken and up to $360-million has been wasted.

“The conventional approach has been that the [nonprofit] has told donors what they think they want to hear in an effort to keep the relationships and money flowing,” Mr. Breslin says. “The water sector would do much better if we’re honest about what we’re doing well and honest about what we’re not and treat philanthropists like people who don’t just hand over money but care about this issue.”

An ‘Accountablity Summit’

The risk of not assessing whether projects succeed over the long term—and not sharing that information with donors when it does exist—is that the same failed approaches get copied over and over again, he says. For Mr. Breslin, who moved to Kenya after college, worked for several charities including the Mvula Trust and WaterAid, and didn’t return from Africa until he was hired by Water for People, it’s personal.

“I’ve taken far too many kids to the hospital,” he says. “I’ve buried far too many children who’ve died because of this fluff.”

One step toward Mr. Breslin’s vision for a culture of measurement and openness is a new cell-phone technology that he unveiled in October. The smart-phone application, known as Flow, enables Water for People to track in real time which of its water points are working and which need repair, as well as which types of projects have been most successful—and make that data available to donors.

Water for People also helped sponsor a conference in Washington in October that brought other water groups together with grant makers such as the Case Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, so the groups could talk about resolving some of the obstacles they face in their work.

The charity also held its first “accountability summit” in New Orleans last month, an effort to share details on its programs with donors. Mr. Breslin hopes to hold such meetings regularly, perhaps bringing people from Africa and elsewhere to talk about their work at future events.

“Ned has really taken up the torch of brutal transparency,” says Aaron Walling, program coordinator at A Child’s Right, a water group in Tacoma, Wash. “He is really pushing the monitoring and evaluation, making sure the field work they do is really sound, and really just calling it like it is.”

‘Fascinated’ Donors

Water for People’s budget has been growing, to $11-million this year from $5.5-million in 2007. In 2011, it hopes to raise $15-million.

The charity won its first grant from the Gates foundation in August, a four-year, $5.6-million award to develop business solutions to improve sanitation. After the Case Foundation learned that its donation to Playpumps International, to install playground equipment that helps power fresh-water delivery, wasn’t working out as it had hoped, the Washington fund gave Water for People $2-million in cash and Playpumps technology last year.

“We just became very fascinated with who these guys were and how they wanted to change the conversation,” says Erich Broksas, senior vice president of innovation and investment at Case, who now serves on Water for People’s board. The foundation spent about six months talking to many different water and sanitation groups, Mr. Broksas says, but were particularly struck by Mr. Breslin’s desire to move beyond how many people are served by a project as the measure for success.

Mr. Breslin’s approach also appeals to Steve Rosenthal, a businessman in New Orleans who, with his wife, has made a $500,000 matching gift three years in a row to Water for People. Mr. Rosenthal said he had grown frustrated with how other international development groups seemed better at fund raising than programs, and had been struck on trips to Africa by how many broken projects there were. Mr. Rosenthal prefers to be told of the chances that projects might fail: “I have no illusions. We could work for several years and not come up with much, or we could come up with ideas that knock it out of the park.”

At the same time as it has gained donors like the Case Foundation and Mr. Rosenthal, however, Water for People has also lost some supporters. Mr. Breslin says some donors have stopped giving because they wanted to pay for the entire cost of projects, a practice Water for People discourages. The group asks local governments and communities to pay a portion of the costs to build a water point, an approach it says helps ensure that residents are committed to maintaining the technology over time.

Indeed, Water for People’s shift to greater measurement and openness has made the work of staff members, fund raisers in particular, more difficult. The old model of fund raising involved selling the idea of a project to a donor, with a cost attached, and handing over a report once it was installed.

Today, fund raisers must convey a far more complicated message: The installation of a project is just the beginning of a journey that might take a decade. Over time, the project might not work as initially intended, which could cause Water for People to shift gears.

Some staff members have left as a result, Mr. Breslin says. The fund-raising department has seen the greatest attrition. “There were people who just said, I can’t do this,” he says. “We had bad days.”

Meanwhile, not everyone who works in water and sanitation thinks Mr. Breslin is on the right track. Chris McGahey, a water and sanitation specialist in Washington, thinks Mr. Breslin’s focus on what goes wrong is off the mark. The failure rate of water projects isn’t any higher than in other types of global development, Mr. McGahey says, and the emphasis should be on what it takes to make a water project work well. “There is another side that Water for People doesn’t address,” he says, which is “why are the successes successful?”

Early Warnings

Mr. Breslin, however, says his group spends a great deal of time studying what has worked and that his focus on measurement is just as critical to increasing the number of projects that succeed. And he gives examples of how struggling projects can and have been turned around by getting early warnings into what has gone wrong.

Water for People installed toilets in Bolivia, for example, but many of them went unused. Now the organization is taking a business approach to the sanitation issue, working with local people who pay individuals for their urine, which is then used to help pine trees grow. The trees produce a kind of mushroom that is profitable to sell. It sounds far-fetched but,the group says, so far it is working.

The hope is that the new cell-phone technology will help track all this much more accurately. Water for People spent $160,000 to create the application, and it is making it available free to any nonprofit that wants to use it.

Charity:Water, the New York group that raises money for wells, has already said it will use the tool in its projects in Rwanda. And some groups that work to improve nutrition and education, among other problems, have approached Water for People about using it, Mr. Breslin says.

Mr. Broksas, of the Case Foundation, which helped to develop the technology, says the tool won’t solve every problem, but that it could change what he calls a “broken process” of doing evaluation by visiting sites, recording results on paper, entering that data in spreadsheets, and sending the information to headquarters.

He says he can imagine a time when the foundation would require it of other grantees. Other foundations, too, are talking about using it with their grantees, Mr. Breslin says.

Mr. Breslin is able to inspire confidence in donors, in part because of his experience working abroad. He started in northern Kenya in the late 1980s, on the advice of a college professor of his who was from Somalia.

His first assignment just happened to be a water project. “I loved it,” Mr. Breslin says.

In charge of the project was a man named Dilly Anderson, a program manager at Lutheran World Relief. When Mr. Breslin was getting ready to leave, he asked him for one key lesson, advice that it turned out would shape a career.

“He said never be afraid to look back and be humble enough to learn from that,” Mr. Breslin recalls. “You’re never going to get everything exactly right, but if you don’t know what happened in the past, I guarantee you will get it wrong.”