A Borehole Is Not Finished on Handover Day.
Published on HivePostify by @wellsforall · Mon Aug 31 2026
Walk through rural Ghana, or many other areas in Sub-Saharan Africa, and you will likely encounter a borehole with an idle, rusty handle and a cracked and dry concrete pad. Someone drilled the hole. Someone took a photo cutting a ribbon. Then at some time, the borehole stopped working and remained that way.
One of the toughest realities in this field is that there are numerous studies throughout the continent that report a high percentage of rural water supply points stop functioning within several years of initial installation. The issue is not with the technology used (boreholes), which are very good, but rather that the organisation that drilled the boreholes viewed handover day as the final step. The drilling equipment departs, the photos go online, and the community is left with an asset with no plan to maintain it when it fails.
Handover Day is different for our team. To us, handover day marks the beginning of the phase of the project that ultimately dictates if the water source will be functional in the future. Below we explain how our approach enables communities to maintain access to a reliable source of clean water for extended periods of time. This can be achieved through three distinct layers.
First Layer: Community Ownership
The well is owned by the community. Not just a slogan. Fact.
Prior to commissioning a borehole, the community establishes a water committee comprised of local individuals, selected locally, and assigned management responsibilities for the pump. These committees retain all operational records, provide day-to-day oversight over the use of the borehole, and are typically among the first to identify potential issues since they utilise the borehole daily. We do not give villages gifts and depart. Instead, we deliver assets that belong to those same villagers.
Community ownership leads to care for the asset. An unassigned group can assign responsibility to anyone. A specific group of people, identified by name and answerable to their neighbours, tend to take care of their shared resource.
Second Layer: The Community Water Fund
Ownership alone is insufficient. Without funding, ownership equates to a sense of responsibility with limited ability to perform repairs. Therefore, the second layer involves creating a financial mechanism.
Every community maintains a water fund. All users pay modest fees for each unit of water drawn, and those funds accumulate locally into a single pool designated specifically for maintaining the operation of the pump. Thus, when a component breaks down (and components break down), maintenance is not a disaster requiring international aid organisations to recognise and react. The required funding is available locally, maintained by the community itself, and managed by members of the community themselves.
In essence, this is the layer most often lacking in failed boreholes. Borehole failure rarely occurs due to catastrophic events. Rather, most borehole failures occur due to minor faults that are easily repaired – provided someone has $50 available to make the repair. The Community Water Fund exists solely to ensure that $50 is always available.
Third Layer: WellsForAll Oversight
The third layer includes our continued involvement with communities long after we have departed.
Upon completion of each borehole project, we do not vanish. In addition to providing ongoing support to established water committees, we also establish lines of communication with each community that we have worked with in order to facilitate troubleshooting assistance and guidance during times of difficulty. If a local fund becomes depleted or if a repair requires a replacement component unavailable in local markets or if a water committee requires additional training or technical assistance, we remain accessible to assist. As such, our oversight serves as the "back-up" – or layer capable of addressing issues that cannot be resolved by either of the first two layers.
While none of the three layers described above would function independently, absent funds, ownership will lead to stagnation; absent oversight, funds may become disorganised; and absent local ownership, oversight will simply replicate historical dependence patterns. Collectively, the three layers described create a framework for sustainable water solutions.
Why We Are Sharing This Information
Because while sustainability is often discussed within this industry much more frequently than practised, the distinction between discussion and actual practice defines whether a village will have access to clean drinking water for 10 years versus having a rusted monument commemorating a good idea.
We prefer constructing fewer wells that continue operating successfully than producing more wells that fail and represent nothing but evidence of past intentions. Each borehole constructed by us has been funded transparently and documented on-chain – and we want our record to indicate not only did we construct a borehole but that it continues to operate successfully today. Sustainability is not merely a marketing tagline for us; it represents our entire philosophy of construction.
How To Support Our Work
Donate directly:
Hive/HBD: @wellsforall
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[Become a WellKeeper](wellsforall.org/wellkeeper); a monthly commitment that funds ongoing maintenance for existing boreholes: wellsforall.org/wellkeeper
Support our proposals on the Hive DAO when they go live.
Share this post. Visibility turns into funding. Funding turns into water.
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WellsForAll Africa LBG · Registered in Ghana, Reg. No. CG080641125 · Operating since 2022.
Water. Hope. Life.
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