40 Chances

by Howard G. Buffett

  In so many poor areas of the world, limited water access goes hand in hand with food insecurity. Women and girls pay an enormous price for that. Water is so scarce in parts of rural Africa that women and girls walk miles to fetch enough for the family’s needs, and the water they do obtain may contain pathogens or other contaminants. In India, which also battles shortages, water distribution is uneven, as government workers manually open and close valves to distribute it. Water duty, waiting by a spigot with a container, hoping that it begins to flow, may take many hours a day and keep girls from attending school. As you drive around the country, you’ll sometimes see a crowd of women and girls gathered around a pipe that has sprung a leak.

  A girl in India spends hours of her day waiting as water drips through a leak in a pipe so that she can provide water for her family’s needs. Photo: Howard G. Buffett

  THE MOST BASIC NEED OF ALL

  Because it was so important to my parents that my sister, my brother, and I pick important, not easy, problems to work on, I constantly ask myself how our foundation can have the biggest impact possible. Clearly, expanding and protecting people’s access to clean water is one of the planet’s biggest challenges. Only 2.5 percent of all the water on Earth can be classified as an accessible freshwater resource. The average person needs to drink less than one gallon of water each day to stay alive, but it takes about eight hundred gallons of water to produce just one person’s daily food needs, according to the FAO.1 Water is so important to life that families will put a child on a dangerous road night after night with a burden that a grown man would struggle to carry.

  Not long after I visited Togo, I had the idea that just as my parents had given me the funding in a dream scenario of sorts—here is a billion dollars to make the world better, so get busy—what if I could gather experienced people already working on water issues and urge them to “think big” about water? If we could represent a new source of funding that did not involve raising money project by project, what would their ideas look like?

  We gathered some leading NGOs for a meeting in Omaha. I figured that between the group they had about 250 years’ experience. To prime the pump, so to speak, I asked, “What if we put our support for wells on steroids; say, commit to funding ten thousand boreholes?” We had done some limited funding of well-drilling projects, and it was satisfying to see a community get that resource. If we drilled thousands of wells for disenfranchised, fragile populations, how many kids could now go to school? Could we reduce the incidence of waterborne illnesses? Could we raise the quality of life and conserve the energy from all those millions of trips back and forth for water? Is that the Big Idea we could fund?

  The NGOs were reserved and thoughtful in their responses. One reason well drilling had become so popular, they explained, was that it is fairly easy to raise money for that. Many donors are drawn to what seem like dramatic, simple ways to help a struggling community, and there are NGOs that do nothing but drill wells. But wells are not the answer to every community’s water challenges. It may be for a technical reason, such as that the water table is too deep, or one of several other more complex factors.

  Access to water is not just about having a source of water. Priorities can be very contentious within a community. Should water for drinking be the top priority? Should one farmer closer to a water source be forced to conserve so that others downstream can have more? How do you measure who is using what? Does it make sense to drill a well when, if you could just keep livestock away from a pond or river, you could have a ready, clean source? In other words, the NGOs said, to improve a water access challenge, you have to study it first. You must understand who the important parties are, what their existing sources of water are, and how any given community upstream or downstream might be linked to another. Just deciding where to locate a well is often so tied up in local power structures, rivalries, customs, and geographic idiosyncrasies that it can create bitter resentments and conflict.

  My idea—ten thousand boreholes—clearly was not the Big Idea; the NGOs made a good case that water planning and management is a messy, people- and time-intensive process far more complicated than drilling wells.

  Okay, if not wells, then what?

  The NGOs all agreed that the short-term budget cycles and time horizons of donors posed obstacles to Big Ideas, which often cannot be executed in a two- or three-year time frame. Thus, the incentive was to look for small, manageable projects with quick but not necessarily sustainable impact, so they could point to success. They said if they had longer time-frame support, they could plan and execute more comprehensive and long-lasting solutions for vulnerable communities.

  That made sense to me.

  Second, they felt restricted because donors typically are not interested in spending money on governance or long-term planning. Many philanthropists and foundations do not have the patience to put in place the people and processes needed for long-term solution management, or what we often call “capacity building.” I understand their hesitation. It’s easy for an NGO to tell me how many people gained access to an improved water source, but it is difficult to show me the impact of setting up a local water committee so that communities can determine the best and most affordable solution for their need. But if you don’t create a local management structure, the NGO will be in business with that community for a long time. It will never equip the local people with the tools they need. What happens when the well is damaged or a part breaks? What kind of resources are there to get it fixed? In the regions we’re trying to help, there is no Ace Hardware or Rural King handy, and no money to buy the parts anyway.I

  I agreed that we should support these “soft” activities and the NGO partners could leverage resources for equipment and technology from other donors. In other words, our dollars could improve the outcomes for the funding that the NGOs said was much easier to secure.

  Third, you can’t escape geography and politics. Whether you are in California or Cameroon, water issues almost always pit those upstream against those downstream, and rivers and lakes that cross or share borders are common. I’ll never forget going to northern Angola to inspect an area of extensive springs where an NGO was trying to raise funds to create a diversion system in order to irrigate more Angolan crops. It seemed to me there was a lot of water that could go a long way to alleviating food insecurity locally in Angola. But Annette Lanjouw, a veteran of conservation initiatives in Africa who worked with me at the time and was on that trip, pulled me aside.

  “Do you realize where we are?” she asked quietly. “These are the headwaters of what becomes the Okavango Delta. These waters flow through to Botswana. Diverting water here could have big ramifications downstream to one of the most important ecosystems in the world and the people who live there as well.” I made doing a thorough environmental impact report a precondition of funding. This study never happened, so we never funded the project.

  The NGOs convinced me that in order to make a difference, you have to work locally, within a region of a country, nationally, and also between nations. Advocacy is a way to leverage investments on the ground to achieve impact on a bigger scale. In many areas of the world, it’s about figuring out how to make governments accountable for taking care of their own people. We added advocacy and transboundary work to the plan.

  The scope of all this was much broader than I first envisioned. My original suggestion of wells on steroids was turning into everything from sanitation education, to community coordinating, to technology assessments, to dam studies. I didn’t realize it at the time, but we were assembling a Big Idea around water-related projects nobody else wanted to fund.

  I had some concerns, but I knew that to make a big impact, we had to make a big bet. I agreed the foundation would ask for proposals with a ten-year time horizon and welcome a broad array of activities. This breadth made me nervous, but I liked that our funding was going to what was needed but not as readily available.

  What I wanted was for our NGO partners to un
leash some innovation and creativity. I wanted them to think like a team on this, not compete for our support. I wanted them to share information and be open to learning from one another. I wanted to make sure the programs targeted the rural poor, the most vulnerable people in the most difficult situations. We agreed to focus efforts in four countries in Central America, five countries in West Africa, and four countries in East Africa. We established regional coordinating committees to oversee efforts. These reported to a global steering committee that included representation from the foundation. To provide some leadership, we designated one multinational NGO as the project lead in each region.

  I did not want to micromanage this, nor did our foundation have the staff to do so. Our partners brought us the first round of proposals, and we generally funded what was put in front of us with few changes and little feedback on their proposals. I knew an alternative approach would be for the foundation to hire staff and consultants who would systematically analyze and organize the opportunities and bring on staff with the technical expertise to monitor and evaluate what we were calling the Global Water Initiative (GWI). But that would take a long time and resemble existing approaches. I don’t like building up a lot of bureaucracy inside our foundation because it triggers exactly what frustrates me about the larger NGO world: activities designed to perpetuate overhead and staff. I’d rather empower people with rolled-up sleeves in Nicaragua or Mozambique than hire consultants to think big thoughts in Decatur. I am impatient. I would rather learn the lessons faster, even if more painfully, by setting doers in motion to see what happens.

  We started writing checks—some of the largest the foundation had ever written for a single initiative. What happened?

  The short answer: given what we spent, not enough.

  REVERTING TO OLD THINKING

  Within a year or so of the launch, I realized that GWI wasn’t working the way we had discussed or planned. I wasn’t hearing enough interesting or creative ideas. Over the next three years, I realized we needed more help and brought in several consultants to provide more management advice and guidance from the foundation’s perspective. We even commissioned an independent external review, which came back more positive than I expected but which revealed an initiative that did not resemble what I thought I was launching. After five years and about $70 million invested, I was frustrated and disappointed.

  So, what went wrong? We saw few programs I would call innovative. We did not even inspire creativity in proposal writing, as the annual funding requests we required with each passing year started to look more and more like a typical one-year project proposal. Every year, the organizations complained that they had to renew their funding with us, when they thought they were going to have a ten-year commitment. My response was, you do have a ten-year commitment, so present a ten-year vision with milestones, and we will hold you accountable every year to your progress against this plan. But their internal bureaucracy and accounting systems worked against that idea. Our contacts within the NGO would say that their organizations were preparing to release staff assigned to GWI every year, pending our approving their budgets. It took awhile for us to realize a basic disconnect: the NGOs wanted a ten-year time frame with guaranteed funding for the duration, whereas we thought we’d made it clear that we wanted a ten-year plan and evidence they were creating sustainable progress on the ground.

  It also became clear as time passed that the “global” in GWI was in name only. The NGOs had failed to create a mechanism to share information or practices across regions. The three regions created incompatible systems to monitor and evaluate their own activities, so as a foundation we could not even communicate or compare what GWI was doing on a global basis. Regionally, some of our partners seemed to practice “don’t rock the boat” management. Instead of funding the best ideas and holding each other accountable, the committee politely made sure that every country and every partner got an equal share so that nobody would be offended. The structure was so complicated that way too much money went to trying to hire enough staff to make the cross-collaboration work. And with each passing year, more and more of our funding went to hardware and water systems as the other supposedly “easy to raise” donor dollars never materialized.

  All was not entirely bleak. There were some individual successes, and it is fair to say that thousands of people now had access to clean water resources thanks to GWI, particularly in East Africa. In Central America, our GWI partners created a process for helping communities and local governments map out their resource options, manage watersheds more sustainably, and implement simple tools such as user fees and metering to take over the challenge of better water access for the long term, which was somewhat encouraging.

  For example, in Nicaragua, the municipality of La Trinidad was a GWI success story. Thanks to GWI, La Trinidad had joined forces with two other municipalities to establish a watershed committee to save the local river, which had been decreasing year by year due to low rainfall and losing water quality due to deforestation and contamination by surrounding communities. The committee launched an environmental and sanitation education campaign supported by the minister of education and worked to reforest critical areas. It created an office for conflict management to handle water disputes, so that for the first time, the population had somewhere to bring issues. Even though Nicaragua had a national water act in place, GWI helped the municipality establish local ordinances to regulate water use, ban the burning of trees, and encourage the adoption of drip irrigation, which helped lower water use during farming.

  Also in Nicaragua, in the community of La Pacaya, we met with an eight-member water committee also established with the help of GWI. One of its first acts was to provide each household with a water meter, which allowed the committee to charge a small fee per connection per family, so it could build a fund for water system repairs. The water committee was appointed by the population at large, and it was impressive the way it took ownership of the water management issues across the board, from reading meters and keeping a water use log, to simple projects such as building natural rock filters to treat wastewater so that it could be used on plants after twenty days.

  These projects impressed me. The trouble was, these successes could have been achieved with a lot less money and bureaucratic complexity. GWI seemed to illustrate a frustration I have with large, multinational NGOs: even an almost blank check, a long-term commitment, and a willing donor could not overcome institutional issues that I believe hold these organizations back. Their size and bureaucracy stifle their ability to solve problems on a large scale where it seems they should be able to operate. They focus on projects and activities, not enough on outcomes, and not enough on learning to work together instead of competing for the same dollars in the same way.

  In fairness to NGOs, a lot of these behaviors are donor driven. Donors want to see and understand where their money went, and it’s easier to explain activities and outputs in stories about improvement in one village or another. But sustainable outcomes demand bringing partners to the table and figuring out new ways of working together, making sure that the best people take on aspects of the challenge suited to their strengths, and building a plan meant to eventually end an NGO’s involvement, not sustain or grow it. Fortunately, we do have projects where we are seeing some of this innovation, so I know it can happen, and we’ll talk more about those in the next two chapters. But it has not happened with our GWI yet.

  That’s a pretty harsh critique, I know. These organizations are working in difficult conditions in some of the world’s most challenging and unstable regions. We also played a large role in GWI’s not living up to my hopes for it, and it’s a lesson that informs decisions we make today. We let too many projects start up in too many places simultaneously; later we could work backward from where each ended up and see what went wrong, but in real time it was too much to oversee. Given how broad GWI’s scope was, we probably would have needed three or more full-time people to actively manage the grantee
s in a way that kept them on track and accountable to the original vision. At one point, we even realized that one of the NGOs had accumulated $1.5 million in its bank account but never spent it, even as it continued to submit new funding requests that we continued to consider. (The bank account is now applied to ideas we approved.)

  In 2010 I decided I wanted our annual report to acknowledge our failures, highlighting the lessons we had learned that year from investments we had made. In the Central America region, the GWI team became aware of a community in Samulali, Nicaragua—made up of six hundred families and three thousand people—whose water systems were failing on several fronts. The water source was contaminated from pesticide usage and coffee production, and sanitation conditions were poor. People were drinking the same water that farmers were using for livestock. A GWI partner came in and held meetings to try to organize a community-based response but did not consult families most likely to benefit or key community representatives. Nonetheless, the partner appointed a water committee to manage some of the sanitation and water metering elements. Unbeknownst to that partner, friction within the community led to a rival committee forming. GWI tried to work with both to compromise on a plan for shared costs, but the situation became so volatile that actual threats were made to GWI staff. The project had to be abandoned.

  In East Africa, the GWI team wanted to introduce drip irrigation technology in Kenya. GWI funded a plan to set up three demonstration gardens attached to three primary schools. The idea was that local farmers could come see the demo plots, while the food grown could supplement school feeding programs, and students could actually learn the techniques and eventually introduce the technology to their families’ farming. Those were admirable ideas, but here the main problem was that the technology plan just did not fit the program. Pipes to storage tanks did not have adequate pressure, so students had to transport water manually. Silt in the water supply from the river and open-water sources clogged the drip lines. The technical issues in Kenya could have been predicted if someone familiar with drip irrigation systems had been consulted.