What a water point actually costs
The handpump is the cheap part. Here is the ten-year number, and why we insist on funding it up front.
The Indian countryside is full of broken handpumps. Almost none of them failed at installation.
They failed in year two, when a washer went and there was no money for a washer, or when the person who had been maintaining it unpaid decided they had better things to do.
The two numbers
Installing a water point costs roughly what a donor expects. Keeping it working for ten years costs a meaningful fraction of that again — a small maintenance fund, a paid caretaker, spare parts and quarterly testing.
We fund both, together, at the start. It makes our per-unit cost look worse than that of organisations that fund only installation, and it is the entire reason 91% of our water points are still functional at twenty-four months.
Why the caretaker is paid
This is the part donors question most, so it is worth defending directly. A volunteer caretaker works until the day their own circumstances change. A paid one is accountable, and the amount involved is trivial against the cost of replacing a failed water point.
Unpaid extra duty stops quietly. It always does, and it is not a moral failing on anyone's part.
Testing, including the failures
Every site is tested quarterly by an independent laboratory. Where a source fails, we publish the result and fix it — including when the source is one we installed. A water programme that only publishes passing results is not a water programme, it is a marketing exercise.
