“We only know the worth of water when the well is dry,” said Benjamin Franklin, quoting an old English proverb. He might have been talking about how the world is not on track to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for clean water, despite clear evidence that investments in sustainable and resilient water and sanitation services pay for themselves by saving lives. Inadequate access to safe water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) causes 829,000 annual deaths globally, 1.9% of the global burden of disease, and economic losses estimated at $260 billion annually (WHO 2012, WHO 2016).In East Africa, severe and persistent drought periods interspersed with flooding have plagued the region for years, affecting water access and the health and livelihoods of millions. Unreliable and unsafe surface water increases the dependence of rural populations in Ethiopia on expensive mechanized boreholes to extract groundwater. However, borehole performance is sub-par without adequate resource allocations, effective monitoring of borehole functionality, and reliable maintenance services. Runtime sensors attached to 185 boreholes in the Afar Region of Ethiopia report that breakdowns occur 3-6 times a year, downtimes last for months, and uptimes range from 60 to 80 percent.Piped services managed by water utilities face similar reliability issues. There are significant budget gaps for capital maintenance globally, making it difficult for water utilities to conduct needed upgrades and repairs to reduce non-revenue water and improve service reliability and coverage. In four case water utilities studied representing low-income, middle, and high-income countries, maintenance budgets were insufficient to keep on top of repairs and replace assets at end of life, which will lead to declining service levels. In some cases, water services are partly or mostly subsidized, but not enough to fill funding gaps. To fill funding gaps and sustain what is already built, national governments and international donors should acknowledge that tariffs will not be able to cover the life cycle costs of water services. Subsidizing ongoing operations and maintenance (O&M) will continue to be critical to improving service quality and provider performance.The water sector is a system made up of actors from governments, regulators, and funders. Factors inside the system boundary that support sustainability include governance, financing, policy, regulations, technical capacity, environmental considerations, and accountability mechanisms. Together, these actors and factors form a complex system with non-linear and disproportional feedback relationships. For example, when actors fail to coordinate and plan asset management together, the ad-hoc maintenance systems they develop not only reach sub-par functionality levels but waste resources.In Afar, poor quality construction, maintenance, and management of water schemes made the region a candidate for development interventions in asset management and real-time monitoring. However, implementers failed to consider how merely collecting more monitoring data without understanding the data usage and support requirements would impact under-resourced staff. In this work, system dynamics modeling is used to quantify how increased support for O&M could turn around sub-par service delivery models by prioritizing capacity building and long-term reliability over constantly falling behind on fixing failures.Sub-par water service delivery significantly impacts the most vulnerable and last-mile communities. The rural pastoral population in Afar has been poorly served by policy establishing community management bodies to operate and maintain complex motorized borehole systems. This institutional model does not work without external support or in places where populations are mobile, leading to low functionality levels. A survey of households in Mille Woreda, Afar finds that low borehole reliability and daily usage are correlated with higher water insecurity and emotional distress. This proves that increased safe water consumption makes more of a difference to water security and well-being than does mere access to an unreliable source.We need to shift aid and development funding for WASH from the failed service delivery model of project cycles that build it and forget it to one that makes the best use of funds to build sustainable services. Will systems approaches to sustainability or climate-resilient services for water security become the next casualties in the grave of sector buzzwords? Or will nations significantly step up contributions and pay reparations towards public life-giving services, as promised by the human right to water? All that can be said is that - partly - the approach doesn’t matter. Water sector actors understand the problem and want real solutions that address the lack of available resources, not buzzwords. What matters is supporting service providers with the funds to build their capacity according to their needs in the long term.</p
