Turning struggling water providers into functioning utilities, pipe by pipe.
Pipe by Pipe applies a proven turnaround sequence of free digital management tools, a trained staff member, and a seed grant, so small water providers can bill customers, fund maintenance, and grow.
2.1 billion people still lack safely managed water at home, and progress must accelerate eightfold to meet the SDG target.
The barrier isn't only infrastructure. Most small utilities and community water providers in low-resource regions are trapped in a self-reinforcing spiral of decline that makes them unable to attract the investment needed to expand piped services.
The spiral of decline
- Inadequate investment and maintenance degrade service quality
- Water users stop paying and invest in private sources instead
- Falling revenue starves the provider of funds for improvements
- Service declines further, and the cycle repeats
Piped water access in Kenya has stagnated at one in four households; more than half of all households must collect water from outside the home.
Of 504 piped schemes we surveyed across four Kenyan counties, only one in five had the data needed to compute the KPIs required by the national regulator.
Children bear the cost first, through stunting from repeated diarrheal disease, followed by the water-carrying burden on women and girls and the depletion of groundwater.
A turnaround sequence, delivered as a seed package.
The World Bank's Utility Turnaround Framework identifies better information systems and staff capacity as the first steps in nearly every successful turnaround. Pipe by Pipe brings that approach to small providers with three ingredients:
Free digital management tools
The mWater platform handles the daily work of a utility: customer registry, mapping, meter reading, billing, receipts, maintenance workflows, and water-quality monitoring. Offline-capable, cloud-hosted, and free.
A trained staff member
In-person training and on-call local support build the practice of routine, accurate data collection, with monthly data review meetings that turn numbers into achievable actions.
A seed grant
A small unconditional grant funds staff time, equipment, and logistics: the working capital a provider needs to put its new data systems to use.
Accurate Data
Complete baseline mapping of assets and customers. Providers build the customer database, asset registry, and billing records that make performance visible.
Performance Management
Providers set KPI targets and track them on live dashboards. Monthly review meetings convert data into action plans, and small wins accumulate.
Growth & Investment Readiness
Verified performance records build the customer and investor confidence needed to expand connections and access larger, results-based finance.
Reversing the spiral, link by link.
Without a customer registry and a system for tracking payments and performance, a provider has no way to make and keep the commitments that build customer and investor confidence. Data changes that.
Accurate data enables billing and collection
Verified payments raise provider revenue
Revenue funds maintenance and treatment
Service continuity and water quality improve
Willingness to pay and connections grow
"What gets measured gets done."
The approach has already reversed the spiral at national scale.
Haiti: an independent evaluation
An independent evaluation of our data-driven management approach in the USAID Haiti Water and Sanitation Project found it reversed the utilities' "spiral of business decline." All supported utilities increased subscribers and revenue, including a 30% increase in paying customers, and the government adopted the approach across all 29 urban utilities nationwide.
Of global platform adoption: 379,000 users submit 60,000 survey responses and register 5,000 infrastructure sites every day.
Systematic reviews find no rigorous causal evidence linking external support programs to improved water service outcomes, even though technical assistance remains the sector's dominant paradigm. Pipe by Pipe pairs delivery with rigorous, independent measurement to close that gap.
A one-time investment, not a perpetual subsidy.
Pipe by Pipe builds providers whose customers carry recurring costs through tariffs, delivering piped, metered, and treated water. Costs are built from actual staff rates and field survey data, not projections.
Full package for 25 providers in the program: $1,000 seed grant plus Kenyan technical staff, training, and travel. About $14.60 per person served.
At 200+ providers per year, AI-assisted support and training of trainers raise field-specialist coverage from 8 to 25 providers each. $4.60 per person served.
With modest, evidence-grounded growth, each provider serves 2,100 people by year ten, at $4.13 per person newly connected.
Payment and growth ignite from a functioning billing base. Each dollar buys the sector out of a perpetual subsidy.
Generating the pipeline of bankable water businesses the sector is missing.
The OECD identifies the shortage of creditworthy water businesses as the principal barrier to private investment in the sector. In Kenya, a $100M pooled fund for water providers closed in 2023 without ever issuing a bond. Capital was available, but investable providers were not.
Pipe by Pipe is designed to generate that missing pipeline: a new paradigm in which funders support data-driven management improvements up front, ensuring the sustainability of every capital investment that follows.
people served across 25 providers in 2 counties during the study period.
small-scale providers identified by Kenya's regulator within regulated service areas alone, serving over 4 million Kenyans.
additional city dwellers projected by 2050, fastest in smaller cities across Africa and Asia, where thousands of new utilities will need to work.
Built by mWater.
mWater is a 501(c)(3) non-profit with an international team of experts in engineering, public health, and technology, dedicated to creating digital public infrastructure and ensuring equitable access to the benefits of technology.
Our multisided platform model funds free software for 379,000 users through partner investments in shared features, allowing a $100K seed grant to grow into the world's largest water and sanitation database.
In Kenya, mWater has over 13,000 users and works with local partners including FundiFix and the county water offices of Makueni, Kitui, and Taita Taveta.
- 2012mWater founded with a USAID DIV Phase 1 grant to build a mobile water-quality testing app
- 2017–2022Data-driven management reverses utility decline in Haiti; government scales it to all 29 urban utilities
- Today379,000 users, 198 countries, 950M people served by monitored water services
- NextPipe by Pipe: scaling data-driven utility turnaround, starting in Kenya
Help us reverse the spiral, then scale it.
Fund the program, partner on delivery, or bring Pipe by Pipe to your portfolio of water investments. One utility, one community, one pipe at a time.
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