Full transcription of the episode: You’re listening to the Human Rights Chat podcast by New Tactics in Human Rights, and I’m your host, Melissa McNeilly. Together with our guests, we explore tactics and strategies driving real human rights change.
For this episode, I sat down with Sunil Lalvani, founder of Project Maji—maji meaning “water” in Swahili—a nonprofit bringing sustainable, solar-powered water systems to rural communities across sub-Saharan Africa.
What began as a chance encounter in Ghana—two children collecting drinking water from a roadside puddle—led to a systems-level rethink of how water access is delivered and maintained.
Instead of short-term installations that fail within months, Project Maji builds community-centered, digitally monitored solar kiosks designed for long-term reliability.
In this conversation…
we explore why water remains one of the most urgent—and underinvested—human rights challenges of our time, and what it takes to move from charity to lasting systems change.
Melissa: Hi, Sunil. Thanks for joining me on Human Rights Chat.
Sunil: My great pleasure to be here.
Melissa: So today we are talking about Project Maji. For listeners, you know, who might be surprised in 2026 that water scarcity is still a global challenge, can you help us understand this essential question of just why water? Why is it still such an urgent human rights issue?
Sunil: Yeah, about that, that is a great and deep place to start, right? So first of all, just to give numbers in terms of what you said, you know, we got 8 billion people on the planet. One in ten don’t have access to water even today. And I would say that they have no access to water, the numbers go as high as 4 billion people don’t have regular access to clean water. That is one in two people, which is just horrendous and shocking in the world we live in today. So water at its core need is, you know, they say water is life. And of course it is. You know, you are not going to live more than a couple of days without having any water.
But beyond the fact that we need it for life, and beyond the fact that we need clean water to keep good health, what we see certainly in the areas that we work in sub-Saharan Africa, but you see it much in the global south with people who don’t have access to water, is there is a real knock on burden on society. It is a real gender disruptor because the burden of collecting water does fall on the females. I mean, typically, in the areas that we work, to get water, people are walking anywhere between 30 minutes to 3 hours a day to get water, sometimes I see even longer than that, and it is usually the women and girls who are given this task, and that means young girls miss out on an education because they are spending this time getting water, and the women folk in the communities don’t have an opportunity to work, or just be there to be full time moms, so it is a real burden on them.
And I can go on, and on, and on, but there is a lot of there to show that actually the economic knock on effects of not having water are enormous. So it’s baffling to me that we haven’t solved this yet because it’s actually prudent in every government’s eyes that they should be doing it, for the good of their economies even if they do not care about their people.
Melissa: And that urgency that you described, for you it didn’t come out of nowhere, you witnessed a personal moment in rural Ghana. Can you take us back to that day and kind of how it changed the trajectory of your life?
Sunil: Yeah, sure indeed. Now that speaking is exactly what it did to me. So I come from a family business which is in consumer electronics, and I was on a business trip in Ghana, which is why I was there. I was driving along a dirt road, when all of the sudden my driver just came to an abrupt halt. So I asked him, I said, “Why have we stopped?” And he said “Well there is a puddle of water in front of us.” And we were sitting in a 4×4, so I just said, “Well just drive through it like we normally would, why what’s the problem?” And he said, “I can’t because there are 2 kids in the water.” And this really shocked me. I thought, “What do you mean there are two kids in the water? What are they doing?” And my driver being Ghanaian, this was obviously quite normal for him. So he just nonchalantly, yeah they are just collecting their water and then they will move on, and then we can drive through.
But for me I am born up in the UK and water comes out from a tap, not from a dirty, muddle, old up on the road. So I got down from the car and I wanted to understand more. And you know, this was the kind of thing that I heard about, read about, seen some documentaries possibly about, but you know it’s something I have never confronted up front. And speaking to these kids, they explained to me that they live about 200 meters away, up and nearby a hill, and they were on their way for their 1 hour walk to collect water, and they said luckily it rained last night and this puddle of water was just a couple hundred meters away from their village. And you know, you wouldn’t even put your shoe in that water, let alone think that’s a lucky source of water to be collecting for drinking for.
So shocked and horrified, but intrigued, I wanted to learn more. I went up the hill with these kids and spoke to the chief and elders in the village and asked them, tell me what’s going on, why are these kids doing this? And they said yeah, this is just how we live, everyday people have to go an hour each day to collect water, and yes usually the women and the girls have to do it. And I asked, I said, “But what is the answer, there has to be a solution here.” And the chief took me to another place in the village and he showed me a handpump. Now a handpump is a 100+ year old technology that pumps up water from the ground, it delivers water to the communities, and this village had been given a handpump by an NGO a few months earlier, but it had broken down so they had been given the gift of water, only for it to be snatched away again. So now again these kids and these communities have to go and walk an hour each way to go and collect water.
So then I asked the chief what happens, what’s the answer here? You were given this handpump. What’s the next solution? And he said you know when the NGO came and gave us his handpump, they helped us put in place what they call a water committee and somebody from that water committee is put in charge of that pump, and every time someone comes with a bucket to collect water, they gave a coin to the person who is sitting by the handpump and they make a collection so that if and when it breaks down there is a fund to fix it. But this handpump had broken down so quickly, like within 6 months as I said, that they never had enough time to collect enough money to fix it.
But this NGO like many, and this is what frustrates me, and I can talk about this as well, their key measure of success is how many handpumps do they employ, not how many are working, how many people are drinking water today, how many lives are gaining from being in water poverty for the long term, it’s just a short term can we deploy handpumps, and that’s what has happened, the African continent is littered with broken handpumps. Which NGO can make billions of dollars? Maybe deliberately, maybe naively, maybe short sightedly, thinking they have done something. But they actually haven’t.
Melissa: Yeah, and it sounds like your background kind of helped lead you into designing a more sustainable pump and business model for Project Maji.
Sunil: Yeah, indeed. So my business was consumer electronics, so we had a small solar division in the business. And seeing this hand pump, you know, I came at this problem looking at a one-off solution. But I saw this village, I saw these kids, I thought, let’s help these kids. That was the frame of mind I had right at the beginning.
And I saw this hand pump and I thought, that’s not acceptable. We can’t be giving this kind of technology to people in this day and age. And because we had some solar expertise, I challenged a couple of my engineers. I said, look, we want to pump up water from the ground. They have this hand pump. How can we put a solar-based solution to pump up using solar? Because we have abundant sunshine across sub-Saharan Africa. We should be using that.
And sure enough, we came up with what we today call a solar kiosk. So instead of the physical effort of the hand pump, solar panels are pumping up the water and then dispensing it actually across the multiple taps. Because the other problem with a hand pump is even after all this effort, water comes out of one tap. So there’s still a queue of people waiting to get water. So we decided we could put multiple taps and let multiple people collect water at the same time.
But other than building a better solution than the hand pump, what I was also determined was I don’t want to build this thing. And then in two years, some dude like me is driving along on that same road and sees those kids because whatever we built broke down. I thought whatever we built has to work.
So I really liked this idea that people were paying for water. In fact, I frame it in my head, although we tariff people through water, I think of it that people are actually paying for maintenance. They’re just being tariffed through water. So the more they consume, the more they pay towards maintenance. But I like that model that there was some skin in the game, some contribution coming from the village. And the view I took with that first site was, look, if it breaks down, we’ll come in and fix it. Whatever it costs because it was a CSR project for us, yeah, whatever it costs. But if we collect five dollars or ten dollars from the village as a contribution that’s great.
But then having started that, it was actually March 22nd, 2015, so close to 11 years ago now, where we turned the tap on on that first site. And it was the first time that those kids that community were able to get water from a tap. Something we take so much for granted. And it completely changed their lives. And I also say, as you said, it transformed my life as well. From that moment, I knew that we’ve helped a thousand people, which is fantastic. But with 800 million people not having access to water, if the problem is that vast, we’ve got to sort of go big or go home.
Melissa: Thank you for sharing that story. I love hearing how people, how their personal experiences and like personal heartbreak kind of led them into larger advocacy. You know, here at New Tactics, that’s exactly what we focus on is creating these like replicable strategies that can really shift systems. So what would you say is at the heart of Project Maji’s model that has made it so successful since those early days?
Sunil: I think you hit on a really, really important word there, which is systems, you know, and when I got into this whole… I came from the commercial sector, you know, words like sustainability, honestly didn’t mean anything to me or they didn’t really resonate with me until I got involved in this. And the other very important word or phrase which was important and came across to me was systems change. Looking at how things were done, like I said, people are going around and just drilling boreholes, putting hand pumps and walking away. It’s not working.
So we have to do something different and we have to analyze why isn’t this working, and it does boil down to the system being wrong. You can argue, could hand pumps be okay? Could solar systems be okay? That’s a different discussion. Do you live in a house or in an apartment?
Melissa: In a house.
Sunil: In a house. Okay, as do I. But can you imagine that the water company comes along and connects your house with the water pipe, and then they knock on your door, and they say, hey, Melissa, we’ve just connected your house with the water pipe, and we’re now going to empower you to look after this water pipe yourself. I just find that notion completely ridiculous. In the developed world, that’s not what we would want nor accept. We would say, “No, no, you’ve come and plugged it into us. Now, give us a maintenance contract and you look after it, and we’ll pay you for your service.” But in rural Africa, this is what happens. NGOs come and build these hand pumps and then empower the community to look after it themselves. And that’s just a bullshit cop-out to me, really. It’s just, they do, let me say, the easy part and walk away when the hard part has to be done. And that’s exactly where we have to get involved.
And there’s so much serendipity in what happened on that one day. You know, had I driven past five minutes earlier, I wouldn’t have seen those kids. Had I seen a different village, with a working hand pump, honestly, I may well have said, oh, what a fantastic solution. Let’s go and deploy hand pumps all over. But I’m so glad that that happened, that I saw a hand pump because it made me look at this and question what the hell is going on. And I thought, you know, whatever we build, we have to look at the maintenance of this.
And it’s been bloody hard. And it is the hardest thing of what we do because building is relatively easy. You know, going into community, sticking a bit of technology in and walking away and taking some pictures and showing it to donors, that’s really easy. But that doesn’t solve the problem. In fact, it exacerbates the problem because as I said, can you imagine you’re living without water and somebody comes and says, here you are, here’s a beautiful gift now of water and transforms your village, for six months and then you have to go. I arguably it’s even better to not give them that in the first place don’t give them a taste of what what a good life could be if you’re not going to look after it for the long term that’s what frustrates me so systems change is really important we came at this from a whole angle how do we make sure that whatever we build is going to work for the long term and everything we do you know I always say that building the kiosk for us is just step number one and everything starts after that that’s not the end that’s just the start.
Melissa: Yeah, so one of the tactics that really stood out to me is kind of this deep community involvement that you have in installation and far beyond local training, local jobs, you have a remote monitoring system. So can you talk about what that really looks like on the ground and how it is addressing some of those weaknesses differently than other water investments?
Sunil: Absolutely. So when I got into this and I built that first kiosk, I said, we helped a thousand people. And why this had such a profound effect on me, one of the reasons it had such a profound effect on me was I saw those kids and of course I wanted to help those kids, but that was going to be a one-off. But between the time of seeing them and building that first kiosk, which was probably about six months, let’s say, I was absorbing myself in the water crisis, reading about it, understanding why is this happening, et cetera.
And that’s when I just keep getting this number, 800 million people. What the hell do we do about this? So after building site number one and wanting to go bigger, I thought, okay, we can now start to replicate this. Again, using a skillset I had, which was product development, mass production of these kiosks, we can go and deploy them because surely with that many people without water, finding communities was going to be easy, and deploying these things was going to be hard. And actually finding communities that don’t have water is quite easy. You can throw a stone and it’s going to land in a community that doesn’t have water because so many don’t.
But finding communities that are going to welcome us and accept us, understand why we’re coming in, why we have this charging model, actually is really, really difficult. And that’s, again, where this system change is important. That’s where the difference of a traditional NGO, you know. If other NGOs are listening to this, please, I’m not brandishing every NGO with this brush, because many of them do that short-sighted work. Many do very, very good work. And I do want to acknowledge that. That’s really important.
But what we found is, you know, you can go into a community that isn’t asking for you, go deploy a facility and walk away, and you think you’ve done a good job. But we go in and we talk to them. We say, look, first of all, do you need us? Do you want us to come? Okay. We’re going to come in and we’re going to build this thing and we’re going to maintain it for you. Okay. But the condition of that is you have to pay a nominal price for water. Are you willing and able to pay for this water? And there’s a discussion and negotiation then. I say negotiation deliberately because it’s a two-way discussion. We have to agree a price with them, but we come back with a promise as well. Okay. We come back with promising them when we say we’re going to repair this, we have standards on ourselves that we have to repair in a maximum of five days, and we have to make sure that we have a 96% uptime of all our kiosks. That is a promise we give to the village. You’re paying us as customers for a service.
So it’s really a negotiation to say you’re paying for what? Tangible outcomes from our side we have to make sure that the land rights are secure, that all the community understands we want the location of this is agreed with everyone. It doesn’t just go next to the chief’s house, which is often what happens. So that piece, that really shocked me. I didn’t realize that that was going to be such a complex piece, but it is such a critical and integral piece that we’ve learned. If we don’t get that right…
So let me just jump in. We do locate, build, maintain. Locate the community, build the facility, and maintain it. If we don’t get the locate part number one right, part number three, maintain, is destined to fail because we need these guys to look after it as well. And then when we do the build element, we also try and engage local plumbers, local masons. We try and engage them in this. Again, it’s a two-way benefit. We pay them for that work that they contribute towards building these things. So they benefit from that. But also when something goes wrong, rather than us spending a lot of money to send someone in, say, if it’s in Kenya, someone from Nairobi to the village, we can call up the plumber who helped us build the site in the first place and pay him to go and fix it. So it really helps everybody in the facility.
But it’s those kind of things that make sure that we truly can make this thing sustainable with the nominal amount of money that we collect for water revenue. And just to put a number around this, we are now at about 490 sites across three countries. We’re starting a fourth country, Nigeria, in quarter two this year. So I think we’ve proven over 10 years that this model, it has its challenges and it’s really hard work, but I think we’ve proven that we’re onto something because it is working. And you also mentioned mobile monitoring. So all our sites, the payment for the water is done by digital payment. And that allows us to track live who is buying water, how much water is paid for, are the water sales up or down. And that tells us if a site has a problem or not. So we can send people in quickly and efficiently to fix them if required.
Melissa: Sounds like you’ve had some incredible growth and a lot of learning along the way. I want to tap into something you mentioned kind of beyond the infrastructure is this deeper social dimension and shout out to the documentary that you guys have up on your website. I’ll link that in the show notes, but in that we see the community leaders kind of expressing skepticism and wondering, are they going to return? Are they going to complete the work? Is the system going to last? Why do you think that that deep lack of trust exists in so many communities?
Sunil: I think very much for the reasons I said. Unfortunately, too many people have gone in with short-sightedness or fear. You know, I struggle with this one because it is good intention. I won’t question that people go in with good intention. But like I said, it’s short-sighted intention. It’s not really understanding the problem. And that’s caused with good intention, you’ve actually got to cause I would say more harm than good. And that’s left a lot of skepticism in the eyes of a lot of these people that went, sorry to say this, I’m doing air quotes for people who can’t see. But, you know, when the white man comes in and says, I’m going to do something, I think they’ve been burnt too many times to just think this is going to be necessarily good for us. And that’s where we try and change the narrative when we go in and really tell them that we mean what we say and we have to deliver as a result.
Melissa: And it seems like the sustainability and the long-term maintenance, to circle back to what you said in the beginning, really continues to have ripple effects that go far beyond access to water. So I want to circle back to what you said about women and girls often carrying the heaviest burden in water collection. I’m curious, after installation, what changes have you seen in communities, especially for women, after the kiosk becomes operational for them?
Sunil: Yeah, that’s a really good question, a really important point. First, when we build the kiosk, we always engage a caretaker from the local community to be our, well, to be our caretaker, to be our eyes and ears on the ground to make sure it’s running well. And we always try to make sure that that’s a female in the community. It’s not always a female, and that’s more so because the community has to sign off who we choose. We’re so reliant on the community supporting us, we can’t go against their wishes. So sometimes it does happen, frankly, that if the chief says that my nephew needs to be the caretaker, well, we might try and push back against it a little bit, but ultimately we’ve got to concede to the person that they agree to. But we’ll always try and make sure that it’s a female.
So with close to 500 access points that we have now across three countries, we have employed several hundred females directly to be caretakers. So that’s been one very immediate direct impact that Project Maji has had. But at the broader scope, When the community doesn’t have water, it is the women and girls who have to do this.
So also part of our project is before we go in and do anything, in the community, we do a baseline survey. We go and do a demographic survey. We try and understand everything about the community, including how much time is spent by whom in collecting water. So we register how many hours girls and women are walking and spending collecting water. We register how many days people are sick because of waterborne disease, how much money they spend on medicines because of waterborne disease. And then between 6 to 12 months after we’ve installed, we go and do a post-impact survey and do the same measures compared against the baseline.
And it is remarkable to see the immediate difference of how many girls can now go to school and that’s measured in terms of days that they go to school and number of hours that are saved for women to be at home. And then we do a survey to try to understand what they do with that time. Some of them do set up small businesses. Some of them are just there to tend to the home, but we are able to capture those numbers out. And in the documentary, there’s a great story of a lady who opened a rice farm, the lady from that very first village. That’s the kind of thing that giving them water empowers them to do.
Melissa: Yeah, I imagine it’s really exciting to see that impact. On the other side of things, I think, you know, we’re in kind of a difficult global moment for organizations, nonprofits, NGOs facing funding cuts and kind of global economic uncertainty. Can you talk a little bit about the challenges that Project Maji has faced, if any, recently and how you’re adapting?
Sunil: Yeah. A couple of things. The global funding landscape has become more difficult and we haven’t been too badly directly affected by it today. We do have some long-term agreements with donors, so those are in place. Fortunately, they haven’t been affected. But as those come up for renewals, it’s always hard discussions.
But also, storytelling and education to the donor sector is really, really important because on one hand, there is a strong narrative around this phrase impact investing. I take huge issue with that. What that phrase has come to mean, I think it’s a great phrase and it could be really powerful, but I think it’s been hijacked by the traditional financial sector to convert it into a sales tool to be something that it’s really not. Because the narrative around it is often, you know, you can make an investment and make huge impact and have no negative impact on your financial returns. You can maximize financial return and have fantastic impact, and that’s got to be a good thing. So any opportunity in impact investing that doesn’t offer that is now frowned upon, because why can’t I have the Holy Grail? Why can’t I have both? And I think it’s just not possible.
I think the phrase is an oxymoron, or the explanation is, because my definition of looking at maximizing financial return necessarily has to equate to doing societal harm. Because at the most basic level, if you are looking, and I am oversimplifying it, but I believe it clarifies the point. If you are looking to maximize your profits as a corporation, you’re going to look to minimize expenses, maximize revenue, minimize expenses. If you’re going to minimize expenses, that means you’re going to look to pay the lowest possible salaries that you can. You’re incentivized to do that. You’re going to look to use the cheapest raw materials that you possibly can, regardless of what their environmental impact is going to be. The same with transportation, fuels, et cetera. So that’s causing harm. And it’s causing the harm that we need to fix with the CSR budgets that we are trying to get.
There is a strong argument to say that if we don’t maximize profits, make profits, I’m not against profits at all. I come from a corporate background. If we decide, “Hey, let’s pay proper salaries. Let’s not pollute the environment with harmful materials and harmful fuels on transportation, et cetera,” we’re not going to cause some of the problems that need to be fixed by NGOs. That’s what we have to get around. There has to be a compromise on financial return if you want to have impact, but it doesn’t mean you have to swing the whole way to where Project Maji sits, for example, in the nonprofit space. Sometimes you do, and I’ll come to why Project Maji is a nonprofit, but there is the extreme end of maximizing profits and there is the extreme end of complete philanthropy. But there is a whole raft in between that if we are smart about how we run businesses, We can make a profit, we can be innovating, we can live in a capitalist world, and we don’t have to have the problems that we do.
So I think at a global picture, that’s how we could look to solve some of the problems. If I talk about where we sit on the paradigm, which is right at the other end of complete philanthropy, I’ll keep repeating, I’m from a corporate background, it was not my idea to just go out and start a non-profit enterprise. I wanted to help those two kids. And then beyond that, when I started to expand Project Maji, I was looking, I heard this wonderful phrase, social enterprise. I thought, and to me, I define a social enterprise as a company that has a social mission at its core, as opposed to profit. But you run it like a business, which is exactly what we do with Project Maji. Now the financial return is a different thing.
So why are we a so-called non-profit? Because when we look at our mission, which is to serve small rural communities, a thousand people or less, they can’t be served in a profitable way. Okay. I make that statement and then people push back on me. No, no, no, no. There has to be a way. And you’re just not thinking hard enough or finding a way. Okay. Let me tell you this or ask you this. There are innovators all over the world. There are entrepreneurs all over the world. Apart from air, water is the most essential commodity we need, bar none. You go into a community and offer life’s most essential product, and you are a monopoly supplier, any entrepreneur worth their salt is going to say, “That is a fantastic opportunity. I want a piece of it.” So why the hell do we have 800 million people who don’t have access to water if this is such a fantastic business opportunity? And the reality is it doesn’t work at a commercial level. It might work at an urban level where you’ve got critical mass. And even there, I’ll argue that there are a lot of big city water utilities that aren’t working financially well. London is a great example. Thames water doesn’t work. It’s bankrupt. A different story. There is no financially viable way to make rural water work at a sustainable way.
So where does that leave us? That means it costs us about $25,000 to build a kiosk in a village of a thousand people. That might sound like a lot, bu t that’s $25 per person. $25 gives lifetime access to water to a person. When you break it down that way, I don’t think it’s a lot of money at all. Now, what we ask for is we ask for donations to pay for that $25,000 so that we can give the access, and then the water revenue pays for the ongoing maintenance. So we tell a donor, “Give us that money, please, one time. We’ll build it. And then we’re not coming back to you. We’re on our own and we’ll manage it and we’re fine.” That’s our promise to them, which again, I think is quite a compelling proposition. So we can manage it from the water revenue.
Now, when we talk about impact investing, donations, let’s go back to that word investment. I like to think about water and some of the things we talked about earlier on as let me call it a catalytic donation or catalytic investment in a community. Because if we can take a bit of money and give water access to people as a donation, what that then does is it opens up huge investment opportunity. We talked about the women who now have many hours to spare, who want to open up garden farms, little shops, serve the community with maybe a small restaurant or something. And I’ve seen it because it happens.
Those are investable opportunities, but unless you give them access to the most basic needs that they have, you can’t invest in that community at all. So we have to look at it with a bigger picture mind frame to not just think everything has to be looked at as a business. Sometimes that little bit of investment has to be done as a donation because it’s catalytic to open up investment opportunities. That’s my hypothesis. And trust me, I banged my head against the wall to try and get people to understand this. But I wish they would.
Melissa: It makes so much sense. You’re explaining it with such clarity that I haven’t thought about it that way before. But it seems like such important work to be uplifting those most vulnerable communities. And you guys recently, you’ve had a major milestone, your 10th anniversary, right? Which came along with a documentary film that I mentioned. So what’s next? What’s the next big leap you hope to make technologically, strategically, in terms of impact? Like, where do you see Project Maji in the next decade?
Sunil: Yeah, yeah. That’s a very good question. It’s something we’re always debating. So when I set up Project Maji, on day one, when we decided we’re going to go big or go home, my goal immediately was we’re going to reach a million people by 2025. Now, if you bear in mind, we had just built one kiosk that served a thousand people and we didn’t know the space at all. That meant we had to build a thousand kiosks within 10 years to reach the million people. I didn’t know how we were going to do that. I didn’t know how we were going to do it technically, how we were going to do it financially. But like I said, I just knew we had to go for a big number.
And I thought, you know, a million sounds cool. 10 years sounds like, you know, a good target to put it there. So we put it out there. And we closed 2025 with 483 sites. So about close to half a million people, just under half a million people. And it took me a big part of 2025, our 10th year, to kind of reconcile myself with the fact that we hadn’t hit a million people. The word failure hit me a lot of times, and I had to really get my head past the fact that with the help of a lot of loved ones and friends that we hadn’t failed. We’d failed in hitting a particular arbitrary number that we had set, but we’d helped half a million people get out of water poverty and transform their lives, hopefully forever. And I guess I reconcile myself with it with the fact that if we hadn’t set a target of a million people, we wouldn’t have reached half a million. If I’d set a target of 50,000 people, we might have reached 30,000 people or we might have reached 100,000. I don’t know. But I think it did inspire the team in the beginning to sort of go gung-ho because that was the message. Whatever the number was going to be, it was like we just go full out to get to as many people as possible because the crisis is enormous.
So we closed last year with that number. We reset the target of a million people to be done by 2030. I think we’ll do it. I think we’ll smash it, actually. And I’ll talk about why I think we’ll do that, because we’ve learned along the way. But we’ll go to a million people, but then we’ve got to go to 10 million people, and then we’ve got to go to 100 million people. And the reason I talk about it that way is because if you look at it, okay, we haven’t reached a million people yet, but yes, 10 million is the next number out there. And I might be called a lot of things for trying to even think about that. But 10 million people, again, is barely 1% of the problem. So we’re really not making a dent in the whole thing, even at 10 million people, which just sort of highlights how grand we have to think.
So that’s where I went. So if we carry on doing what we’re doing, even at a growing pace, in my lifetime, we’re not solving this problem. So how do we look at doing this exponentially? And how do we look at doing this by bringing in partners? And when you bring in partners, how do you look at exploiting everyone’s strengths? And I guess what we did, as I mentioned earlier, building a site for us is locate, build, maintain, three elements. And I mentioned that locate for us certainly is one of the most difficult things that we do. Whereas build, because of our background, our technology background, is one of the easier things that we do. Not easy, but one of the easier things that we do.
Now, three years ago, I was speaking on a webinar talking about Project Maji to the water sector. And a Ugandan NGO reached out to me afterwards and said, hey, listen to what you’re doing. love your approach on stuff. We’re in Uganda. We’re doing all the work you’re doing, but we’re doing hand pumps. We are maintaining them, but we’re doing hand pumps and we’d love to move to solar technology and digital payments and all this kind of stuff. How can we do that? So we started having a dialogue with them and realized, look, if we wanted to expand in Uganda, we would have to put a new team on the ground. It would take us a year or two, a lot of money. We’d make a lot of mistakes. We’d have to learn about the communities. People talk about Africa. Africa is 54 very, very diverse countries. You can’t just say, “I’ll go from Kenya to Uganda,” and it’s all the same. Frankly, even within the countries, there are vast differences.
So we knew going into new countries, it’s going to be much better to find NGOs who know how to do this “locate” community engagement part really, really well. And bring to them the technology part that they may not know so well that we know well and partner with them. And we can teach them how to do the maintenance. So that Uganda partnership was the first of what we called a franchise operation. Because to me, that’s how Project Maji can scale up.
When I say I want to reach 10 million people or 100 million people, that doesn’t mean Project Maji has to do everything themselves on the ground and that’s how we take it off. If we are involved in making sure access to water gets to people, that’s great. If we do it through partners, that’s even better because why do we have to work in silos? That’s crazy. So Uganda has been ticked. That’s a model that works and we’ve been growing in Uganda. I mentioned that we’re going to be starting Nigeria in quarter two this year, also through this franchise model. And we’re talking to a couple of other people in Tanzania, in Malawi about expanding that way. So that’s how I think we can actually really exponentially expand much more than Project Maji could do on its own by trying to pool the water NGOs across Sub-Saharan Africa together and get us to work on one kind of systems model that we can all get behind and really expand together, leveraging each other’s strength.
Melissa: Right. That collaboration is so key. So what can listeners do to support your work?
Sunil: I always say, you know, I hate to do it, but I always say money is important. Donations are really valuable. So projectmajii.org is where you can come learn about us and donate. But look, if that’s not something that listeners can do, that if they can’t donate themselves for whatever reason, spreading the word about what we do, spreading the word about how important the water crisis is.
There are really good NGOs out there as well. So even if it’s not Project Maji, if you have a passion and you want to support Angola, I’m sure there are really good water organizations in Angola. If that’s what you want to do, just go out and look at them. But look at how important water is because water is underinvested in, you know, And as I said, the catalytic effect it can have on the world and economies is enormous, and it will actually benefit all of us.
You know, the other thing people can look at is when we give water to rural Africa, 50% of the arable land in the world is in sub-Saharan Africa. And I can tell you 80% of that land is farmed by smallholder farmers, individual farmers. Less than 5% of them use irrigation to grow their crops. Let me repeat those numbers because they’re enormous. 50% of the world’s arable land, 80% of that is run by smallholder farmers, rural dwellers. And less than 5% use irrigation because they don’t have access to water. So even simply and even selfishly, if we give these guys access to water, they can irrigate their farms. That makes food production better. That makes food cheaper in the supermarkets in the UK and the US and all over Europe and all that. It has those kind of knock-on effects.
And the same thing with growing cotton and things like that and industry. It affects all of us around the world directly. It’s not just some villages over there. Oh, yes, let’s help them with charitable needs. It actually helps the global economy. That’s what I mean about the catalytic effect of this. And also the frustrating thing is water is a solvable problem. This is not a technology problem. This is not like curing cancer. We know how to solve the water crisis. It is about money and will and desire. And Project Maji and other great organizations like us can do it. But it just does not get the support that it needs. And I don’t know why. I don’t understand why. Because it’s underinvested in but you lose water. Imagine, again, your water utility shuts off water for a few hours. You’re on the phone to them panicking, what the hell is going on with my water supply? Okay, you need to be just to the people that don’t have it for their needs or selfish needs. But I just plead with people, look at water as a cause to support if you’re looking to support any cause.
Melissa: Absolutely. It seems like one of the most basic human rights. But as you talk about the knock on effects, I’m like, our framework is the Declaration of Human Rights. I’m going through my head, like right to life, adequate standard of living, right to education, right to work. All of these things are impacted by access to water.
Sunil: Mm hmm. And just on that point, access to water is not mentioned in there. And the reason is because we just assume it’s going to be there. You can sure as hell know that if it wasn’t there when this was all written, it would have been put there, point number one. But it’s just such an underlying assumption. Of course it’s there and everything else flows from that. And that’s why it’s so critical, again, that it has to be looked at.
Melissa: Absolutely. And to circle back to the beginning of our conversation, when I said there’s probably listeners out there that think, oh, we’re in 2026, like this certainly is a problem that’s solved by now. I’m just so grateful for you sharing your work and the urgency. And I think you should be really proud of everything that you’ve accomplished.
Sunil: Thank you very much for the opportunity to share the story, to share the message about Water. That’s what I love to do, because, again, I think it’s just not out there in the news and in people’s awareness. I don’t think people are aware of it. So the more we can talk about it, people get aware of it. And that’s how we can start to address it. So I thank you for the opportunity. And I just do ask everyone to read more about it and look into it and support us if they can.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Human Rights Chat by New Tactics in Human Rights, where we inspire and equip activists to change the world. I’m grateful to Sunil Lalvani for sharing his insights and for the work he does to make clean water accessible to vulnerable communities.
This episode is dedicated to the water workers in the humanitarian sphere who work tirelessly to ensure that safe water is recognized as a human right.
If this conversation resonated with you, consider sharing this episode and exploring ways to support access to safe water, including resources from Project Maji in the show notes. Thanks for listening.
