drank a cup of coffee using water that
came out of tap I went to the toilet I
did a probably a lot of you guys
did the same thing don’t worry I’m not
going to ask but you were probably
hardly aware of doing it and neither was
I to be honest but that’s me
20 years ago when I was lucky enough to
spend 3 years living in a village in
remote area of rural Zimbabwe doing
research and then my morning cuppa
coffee was made from water that came
from a well more than 500 meters away
that had to be carried to the house and
when I took a shower it was in a bucket
using the same water for three years and
I believe me I was a lot more aware of
the time and effort involved in getting
that water to me then and when I did the
other one it was in that little house in
a piss in the ground I never since then
for the last 20 years I’ve spent most of
my professional life helping to bring
water clean drinking water and toilets
to people in parts of the world where
they don’t have them or to be more
accurate working to build the systems
that are needed to bring those essential
services to people and the reason I do
that is because what for me was an
exciting way to spend three years is for
far too many people their daily reality
that were worse at least 600 million
people in the world don’t have any
source of clean and reliable drinking
water at least 2.4 billion
don’t have any toilet not even a pit
and because of that directly due to that
people get sick and die and a child dies
roughly every two minutes from diarrhea
so statistically speaking a child’s died
since I started talking and I don’t
think that’s acceptable in this day and
age and the reason that I use the word
provocative is as it is is to help
to break through the taboo that
surrounds the subject and that leads
directly to this a taboo that means that
today now in 2017 more people have
access to a mobile phone the do to a
toilet but let me step away from the
world of water and sanitation for a
minute and talk about systems we’re
surrounded by systems we by Transport
Systems by education systems by Health
and Social Welfare and housing systems
and yet despite being surrounded by them
we’re almost entirely blind to them we
see what they deliver but not what it
takes to deliver it and I think that’s
because when you got the bus to come
here or the Train you don’t think of it
as a system but that bus has a driver it
has to be repaired sometimes it drives
on a road that somebody’s built but
somebody else repairs to a schedule
that’s been set by somebody and take all
of that together that’s part of your
transport system or if you or your child
is sick you go to see a doctor and the
doctor refers you to a hospital the
doctor and the hospital are part of a
health system and the hospital is itself
a system full of thousands of moving
parts and when you go to the toilet in
the morning you probably don’t think of
that as a system either but it is you
know you turn on the tap water comes out
you flush your toilet everything goes
away and is made safe and that’s because
there’s a system a system that’s made up
of water companies who you pay your
bills do of water regulators who
sure that the water company is is
meeting all the necessary standards a
banks who lend money to those companies
and the water companies manage
subsystems pipes and sewers water
treatment plants wastewater treatment
facilities fecal sludge management units
and fecal sludge is the technical word
systems within systems within systems
systems that rely on people and money
and infrastructure and information to
make them work but here’s the crazy
thing what the difficult thing for the
whole thing to work for water to come
out of your tap or for something to
happen when you flush the toilet the
whole system has to work all the time
and when a piece fails which it always
will there has to be an ability to
repair it a healthy system is a system
it’s when that doesn’t happen when the
water doesn’t come out of the tap that
we stop being systems blind we begin to
notice systems when you can’t get your
kid into a local school because they’re
all oversubscribed when you spend hours
worth waiting in an emergency room in a
hospital because there’s no beds or no
doctors or when you turn on a tap and
nothing comes out and that systems
blindness that lack of appreciation of
what it is that systems deliver to us
leads to a huge problem in my world it
means that now today up to 30% of the
installed water supply infrastructure in
rural Africa isn’t working
billions of dollars of aid and
investment flush down the drain and you
know when I talk to people I tell them I
work in development I travel all around
the world I bring do water and
sanitation people aren’t sort of excited
and they think what a fulfilling job
that must be amazing and of course
is but when I tell them that no I don’t
actually spend my life digging wells and
villages or making latrines did I work
on building systems that I’ve worked
with governments and help them to get
systems working they often lose interest
I stopped being the action here over I
think they’d hoped to meet and I’ve
become some sort of boring nerd and
nerds are great by the way I think I
like nerds but their systems blind and
that’s a real problem because actually
the most important development work
there is is building systems the only
way that we’re going to end poverty is
through building systems the only way
we’re going to end the need for
few years ago between 2008 and 2012 I
lived in Ghana which is another
fantastic country and I was there
supporting a major initiative on systems
building for rural water and in the time
I was there those few years we spent
quite a lot of money I guess six million
euros maybe a bit more and we didn’t
build a single pump we didn’t lay a
single meter of pipe but what we did do
was to build systems and we did that by
working with the people in those systems
with the users with the hand pump
mechanics the guys who come and fix
pumps when they broken-down with
district engineers the people who are
supposed to plan and think about how to
make does all the multiple systems in a
district work and we worked with other
aid agencies with local entrepreneurs we
even worked with the minister who became
a big champion and what we did with them
was to seek to take away their systems
blindness to make them understand why so
many of the water supplies they were
building were failing and then decided
to do something about that by
understanding their role in the system
and their relations to each other to
develop a vision
of how things could be done better and
to begin to implement that vision how we
did we planned we budgeted not just for
new hardware but to repair and fix the
stuff that was there already and we
brought water services back to thousands
of people I know we’re not there yet
systems building is hardware it’s often
very frustrating work it’s two steps
forward one step back kind of work on a
good day but we have taken away the
systems blindness we have laid the
foundations for the system that is one
day going to bring water and sanitation
to everybody in Ghana when systems don’t
work the results aren’t nice pipes break
down tap stop working gets into the
environment kids get sick and they die
but when we’re systems blind we make
stupid decisions we vote for people who
say they’re going to reduce tax and
improve the quality of services or we
give money to charities who say who want
to use it to build new infrastructure
but when that infrastructure fails
they’re nowhere to be seen yet what I’ve
learned in the last 20 years is that if
we take away our systems blindness and
we work on building the systems at the
same time as the infrastructure we can
achieve amazing things so that’s what I
do I build systems and part of that is
by asking people including all of you to
open your eyes to the systems that
surround you next time you turn on a tap
or next time you use the toilet and you
flush it think about how amazing it is
that that works look at your water bill
see how much you use see how much it
costs and the next time that you see a
politician on the TV
asking for your vote promising that
they’re going to reduce taxes and at the
same time improve the quality your
services in health or in education or
whatever it is or somebody comes to your
door and asks you for a donation to
build a well somewhere in the developing
world it’s going to bring a village
water forever stop from in it ask
yourself ask them if you can if that’s
really practical or are they just
systems blind and if the answer that is
yes then maybe think about voting
somewhere else or put in your money somewhere else thank you