There is no shortage of piped water systems in rural Madagascar. NGOs and donors have built thousands over the last three decades. What there is a shortage of is working piped water systems, three years after they were built.

A cursory read blames spare parts, missing skills, or absent technicians. Those are symptoms. First-principles thinking on almost any failed rural utility converges on the same underlying reason: money. When properly funded, spare parts are easily bought, transport is easily arranged, technicians are easily trained and retained. Maintaining a piped water system is not rocket science. Paying for the maintenance, indefinitely, in a low-income rural context — that is the hard bit.

Endur’O, a joint venture between SaniTap and NatuRano, exists to solve that hard bit. This article sets out how.

Why NGO-built systems fail

The typical trajectory of an NGO-built rural piped water system in Madagascar goes like this:

1. Donor funds a system for a community. Construction proceeds. Ribbon-cutting.
2. NGO staff train a small local water committee to operate and maintain it.
3. Community collects flat-rate contributions (a few thousand ariary per household per month) into a maintenance fund. Contributions are patchy from month one.
4. Six to eighteen months later, something breaks. A pump seal, a solar panel, a valve. The maintenance fund is empty, or is enough to buy the part but not the transport to get a technician to the site.
5. Community tries to make do. Fewer people use the system. Contributions drop further.
6. Two to three years in, the system is non-functional. It becomes another concrete plinth in another village that once had piped water.

Each of those steps is a step someone could theoretically prevent. The problem is that nobody’s job is preventing them. The donor is gone; the NGO’s field team has moved to the next project cycle; the community committee is volunteers with no operating budget. The system is orphaned by design.

What Endur’O does differently

Endur’O treats each system as a running utility, not a completed project.

Ownership. Every Endur’O system is operated by Endur’O — the same entity, indefinitely. There is no handover to a volunteer committee. There is a customer relationship with each household, and a service relationship with the community.

Revenue. Households pay per litre for water they consume, not a flat monthly contribution. Payment is instant, cashless, via prepaid NFC cards topped up through mobile money at franchised shopkeepers. There is no cash to collect, no bookkeeping to keep, no volunteer treasurer to trust. The system meters what is consumed and the money arrives.

Costs. Rehabilitation includes solar-powered boreholes (drastically cheaper to run than diesel or grid), on-site chlorination (removes the need for downstream water-quality remediation), and smart metering built in from day one. Costs per system are lower than a comparable NGO build, and the marginal cost per additional litre delivered falls as usage grows.

Carbon credits. Around 10% of Endur’O’s revenue comes from Gold Standard safe-water carbon credits (methodology ERSDWS v1.0). That revenue is earmarked for repair and maintenance, which means R&M is not the first line item cut when household revenue is tight.

Economies of scale. Endur’O runs 138 systems today and is on a path to 500. Technicians drive between multiple sites in a region on planned maintenance rounds. Spare parts are stocked centrally. A repair on one system draws on infrastructure already paying for itself across all the others.

The NFC Smart Tap in detail

The Smart Tap is Endur’O’s answer to the question of how per-litre metering works in a rural Malagasy context without electricity, without banking, and often without literacy in the operating language.

Each installation has an NFC-enabled water tap. A household holds a prepaid card against the tap and receives water. The tap deducts an amount from the card’s balance in proportion to the litres delivered. When the balance runs low, the household visits a franchised shopkeeper — typically a village store — who takes mobile-money payment and tops up the card via a phone app. The whole flow uses infrastructure that already exists in rural Madagascar: mobile money is near-universal; village shops are on every road.

Behind the scenes, each tap reports usage in real time to a central dashboard. Endur’O operations can see, per system, per day, how much water was drawn, how much revenue was collected, and — critically — whether a system is delivering water at all. A tap that goes silent for a day flags itself. A technician is scheduled before the community even reports the fault.

Three hundred Smart Taps are deployed today. An improved version is now rolling out across new sites.

The two revenue streams, deliberately

Water sales fund the bulk of operating costs. Carbon credits fund repair and maintenance.

That deliberate separation matters. In a bad year — a bad rainy season, an economic shock, a cyclone that disrupts a shopkeeper network — water-sales revenue can drop. If R&M were funded only from water sales, R&M would be the first thing cut. Under Endur’O’s structure, the carbon revenue is a separate stream, tied to the water-safety outcome, and it is protected from cash-flow shocks that hit the water business.

The carbon credits themselves are issued under Gold Standard ERSDWS v1.0, aligned with the ICVCM Core Carbon Principles, and are progressing toward CORSIA eligibility. The safe water carbon logic article sets out how they are quantified.

Where the model is going

The 138 systems in operation today are a proof point, not a target.

Rural piped: the long-term target is 500 rural piped systems reaching 500,000+ people. At ~1,000 people per system, that is a 5x increase in reach over the current base. Each additional system marginally improves the economics of the whole network.

Urban kiosks: the Ministry of Water has agreed operating rights for Endur’O to run public water kiosks in Antananarivo. The pipeline is 7-10 pre-pilot kiosks → 75 pilot kiosks → 250 kiosks at scale, reaching approximately 250,000 people once the pre-pilot is complete. Urban kiosks work on the same NFC Smart Tap model.

Hand pumps: SaniTap’s separate hand-pump programme, operated by MadAvance, is now at 773 pumps under regular maintenance. The plan is to consolidate at 1,000 hand pumps by 2027 and then hold. Beyond that, the water programme’s growth is expected to come from piped systems, where the unit economics are more favourable.

Why the model is durable and not fragile

Three properties give the Endur’O model its durability:

1. Skin in the game. Endur’O owns the systems and lives or dies by their functionality. No orphaned committees; no handover cliff.
2. Metered revenue. The system’s income scales with usage. When more people use it, more money flows to maintenance. When usage drops, maintenance need drops with it. The revenue is roughly proportional to the system’s actual load.
3. Protected R&M. Carbon revenue is earmarked for repair and maintenance and cannot be redirected in a tough month.

None of these are novel ideas on their own. What is unusual — and what makes the model work in rural Madagascar rather than in a rich-country utility context — is the combination, plus the underlying technology (NFC Smart Tap) that makes cashless per-litre pricing physically possible in a place where cash-based flat rates don’t work.