As Africa and the world converge at the Kigali Convention Centre this week for the Africa Water & Sanitation Systems Leadership Symposium, conversations will focus on one of the continent’s most important development challenges: how to build water and sanitation systems that work, endure and serve communities at scale.
The question is particularly relevant because the symposium is not simply examining Africa’s water challenges. It is bringing together leaders, financiers, regulators and practitioners to explore the systems required to create sustainable impact.
Perhaps one of the most important questions is also one of the simplest: what happens after installation?
Water projects naturally attract attention at the point of delivery. A new borehole, treatment system or sanitation facility is visible evidence of progress. Communities gather, photographs are taken and another milestone is celebrated. These moments matter. Yet the infrastructure itself is only part of the solution.
Through my work with The Drink Pure Foundation’s safe drinking water programme in Rwanda, I have seen this challenge from another perspective. Installing a water treatment system may be the most visible moment, but it is only the beginning. Water quality must be verified, operators trained, systems monitored, consumables maintained and results reported.
Local ownership is therefore essential. A system becomes more resilient when the people closest to it have the knowledge and confidence to manage it. Training should not be treated as an activity completed before a project closes. It is part of the infrastructure itself, because technology ultimately depends on people to keep it working.
Without the systems around the technology, an installation can quickly become an intervention rather than a lasting solution.
This is why the conversation taking place in Kigali matters. The symposium’s focus on leadership, accountability, professionalisation and finance recognises an important reality: sustainable water access is not simply an engineering challenge. It is also an institutional one.
Technology can purify water. It cannot, by itself, create the governance, skills, financing and accountability required to keep that technology working year after year.
The distinction is important across the development sector. Projects are usually designed around activities and timelines. Systems must survive beyond them. A project may fund infrastructure today, but somebody must operate it tomorrow. Someone must know when maintenance is required, verify that water remains safe, respond when equipment fails and ensure that resources exist to keep the service functioning.
In other words, access is an event. Reliability is a system.
This requires a different way of measuring success. Counting installations is useful, but it tells us what was delivered, not necessarily what endured. Long-term impact requires us to ask whether infrastructure continues functioning, whether local capacity has been developed and whether communities continue receiving the service that the original investment promised.
It also changes how we think about innovation. Africa certainly needs new technologies, financing models and ideas. The symposium itself is creating space for African youth-led innovations and solutions. Yet the most impressive innovation means little if the system around it cannot sustain it.
The opportunity, therefore, is not to choose between infrastructure and systems. Africa needs both. It needs investment in technologies capable of solving immediate challenges and equal investment in the institutions, people and processes that allow those solutions to endure.
As Africa and the world discuss the future of water and sanitation in Kigali this week, success should not be measured only by how many projects are funded or systems installed. The more important test comes later.
The true measure of a water project is not whether water flows on launch day. It is whether safe water is still flowing years after everyone has gone home.
The writer is a brand strategist working at the intersection of business, communication, and growth.