The Backstory

Matt and Jessica Brown, founders of Lilies in the Field, first visited Uganda in the Spring of 2014. On one of our excursions out from the capital, we visited a remote village called Buwanda with plans to make cursory medical assessments of about fifty children. Half of the children complained of headaches, and we found that they were dehydrated. They also suffered from a variety of skin conditions due to infrequent bathing. We discovered their water source was several kilometers away. Their problem wasn’t poor access to medicine, their problem was poor access to water.

After this lightbulb moment, we shifted our focus from medicine to water. What good is medicine if people's most basic needs aren't met, we thought.

That started our journey exploring sustainable water solutions for remote areas. We looked at what other organizations were doing to see if we could fit in. We began hearing of water sources that had been installed by foreign organizations, only to fail before long because of a lack of management. Most of the water solutions being employed across rural African communities weren’t working. And the traditional foreign non-profit model relies entirely on donor funding to sustain itself and water projects. Cut off donor funding, or even reduce it, and the community is plunged back into water crisis.

We realized early on that the only sustainable solution to developing water infrastructure had to involve collecting revenue. It needed to look like this:

But how could we pull this off? How could we generate revenue in the poorest of communities, where the average monthly salary is $50, and 80% of the population is unemployed? We decided to first explore the most affordable methods for creating water sources.

Matt studied hand drilling wells as a cheap, affordable solution for local communities to develop their own water sources. In 2015 he returned to Uganda to hand drill a well for the community we had first visited, and we’re happy to say that the entire village has now changed thanks to having a water source.

A school, medical clinic and church have all been built around this new water source, and children can get their water right in the middle of the village. But despite the localized success of this project, it didn’t meet our goals for a sustainable water solution. We kept searching.

In 2017, the whole Brown family lived in the north of Uganda for the summer. There we built a 30,000 liter ferrocement water tank for a village elder. We put up gutters on his roof to divert rainwater into the tank.

This became a huge boon for the family, reducing the strain on them to collect water. Since it was far more water than their family of fifteen needed, they were also able to share it with their surrounding community—although we can’t tell how well this has been carried out. But though this rainwater harvesting system was a relatively cheap water solution, yielding a lifechanging impact for this family and possibly their neighbors, it still didn’t meet our goals for a sustainable water solution. We still hadn’t answered this question: How do you provide for the daily water needs of a family, collect enough revenue to maintain the water system, and charge a low enough price that even the poorest can afford it? And how do you do it in a way that empowers people by being locally owned and operated?

We next developed a water distribution model that involved drilling a deep well and then delivering water to people’s homes using the ubiquitous “boda boda,” a cheap and indestructible motorcycle that you see all over East Africa. We carried out community surveys in the town of Karuma to find out a fair price that residents could afford. And we found that if we kept our margins razor thin and delivered high volumes of water, we might be able to break even and recoup our costs. We began moving forward with this model, developing a water distribution site in the center of Karuma town.

Then that infamous virus hit, gas prices in Uganda doubled to $8 a gallon, and our entire model was wrecked. We could never break even with gas prices that high.

We pulled back and brainstormed. Electric motorcycles were just emerging onto the market. That might work. But another idea began to come into focus, an idea we’d been looking at for several years without a viable solution.

The idea was to place water points throughout town, all piped in from a single water source. The idea of running pipes to every hut in a village was never a viable solution because of the cost, but what if we just ran, say, 10 pipes to 10 strategic water points in town? We could even use the same centralized water site that we had been developing. But the problem we kept running up against was how to collect revenue. If these were just open spigots, no one would pay for water and the water source couldn’t be maintained. There wasn’t a simple, affordable way to collect revenue at the point of distribution.

Then we discovered a new technology that was beginning to get deployed in sub-Saharan Africa that did this exact thing: Smart Taps!

We looked at the numbers, plugged it into our model, and it looked like we could charge an unbelievably small amount for distributing water via these smart taps—half a penny for 5 gallons of clean water.

So we went full steam ahead, launched our pilot project at the end of 2022, and it’s working.