The standard institutional patterns in impact-and-development work pair a commercial entity with a charity (with familiar tensions), or a multinational NGO with a local partner (with familiar authority asymmetries), or a government programme with implementing contractors (with familiar accountability gaps). SaniTap’s structural pairing with MadAvance is deliberately different from all three, and — on the evidence of the last four years of operations — materially more productive than any of the standard alternatives.

This article sets out what the model actually is, what it has delivered in operational terms, why the pairing works structurally rather than incidentally, and what the design implies for the carbon-integrity of the projects the pairing operates.

The audience is investors and partners evaluating SaniTap’s execution capability, procurement analysts assessing what the delivery model implies for verified emissions-reduction reliability, and academic readers interested in the institutional-design question of how effective impact-scale organisations can be structured in low-income national contexts.

The structure

SaniTap Ltd is a UK-registered impact business founded in 2020 by Andrew Tanswell (UK national, serial social entrepreneur) and Adriaan Mol (Dutch national, based in Madagascar).^[1] Its operations are concentrated in Madagascar; its incorporation and legal footprint are structured for international carbon-market access. This includes Gold Standard registration, active Article 6 engagement with the Government of Madagascar, and international commercial credit sales.

MadAvance is a Malagasy NGO, co-founded and funded by SaniTap in 2023. It employs more than 80 local staff across field operations, project management, community engagement, monitoring, and maintenance activities.^[2] It is structurally and legally an independent Malagasy organisation registered under Malagasy law. It is not a SaniTap subsidiary; it is a partner.

The two organisations are joined by a long-term operational partnership, not by common ownership or common management. SaniTap funds programmes; MadAvance delivers them. SaniTap handles international carbon-market access; MadAvance handles community engagement, field operations, and on-the-ground monitoring. Both organisations contribute to project design; both share monitoring data; both maintain separate governance structures.

What the model has delivered

Concrete outcomes as of the most recent reporting period, achieved over an operational window of approximately twelve months from establishment of the partnership at scale:

• 725 water points rehabilitated. Across a defined geography, prioritised by impact-per-restoration, with detailed pre- and post-condition documentation for each installation. This is a pace of rehabilitation notably faster than comparable WASH-rehabilitation programmes in Madagascar, or in comparable rural low-income geographies globally.
• 120,000 clean cookstoves distributed. Across urban, peri-urban, and rural communities, with documented adoption at the household level, gender-disaggregated training, and ongoing usage monitoring. Achieved in ten months from the start of the distribution programme.
• 500,000+ beneficiaries served by the combined water and cookstove interventions.
• 88 local jobs created at MadAvance directly, with additional indirect employment in the supply chain (spare parts, maintenance technicians, water-guardian roles across the project geography).
• Stakeholder engagement at three tiers — community consultations at the fokontany level, regional coordination with district authorities, and national engagement with the Government of Madagascar on Article 6 authorisation and policy alignment.

These are not projected figures. They are operational outcomes already produced through this partnership model, in the period before SaniTap’s first carbon credit issuance.

Why the model works structurally

Three structural reasons distinguish this pairing from either a purely commercial venture or a purely NGO-model operation in the same geography.

Company speed plus NGO trust. A purely commercial venture in Madagascar would face substantial community trust barriers. Communities have experienced extractive commercial actors (mining, timber) and treat unfamiliar commercial entities with appropriate caution. A purely NGO-model operation, dependent on donor funding cycles, faces predictable constraints on scale and pace: bureaucratic overhead, short funding horizons, reporting-driven distortions of programmatic priorities. The pairing bypasses both failure modes. SaniTap operates with commercial decisiveness on questions of time and money. MadAvance operates with local credibility built through years of embedded community relationship.

An observation crystallising this point came from outside the two organisations, during a 2024 fundraising discussion: that this partnership had merged the speed and efficiency of a company with the impact of an NGO, and that this combination is materially more powerful than either constituent alone. The reverse combinations — an NGO acquiring speed, or a company acquiring impact credibility — have been widely attempted and have generally underperformed.

Aligned but distinct mandates. SaniTap’s mandate is high-integrity carbon project development with measurable climate outcomes and a financially sustainable model. MadAvance’s mandate is climate, water, and health outcomes for the Malagasy communities it serves. The two organisations align almost completely on what gets delivered — improved cookstoves, restored water access, training, monitoring — while diverging on how each defines success. SaniTap defines success through verified credits and credit-buyer satisfaction. MadAvance defines success through community outcomes and SDG-impact reporting. This alignment-plus-divergence is mutually reinforcing rather than conflicted: each organisation prioritises what the other, structurally, is less well-positioned to prioritise, and both align on the delivery activities that produce both outcomes.

Local capacity stays local. When SaniTap funds a stove distribution or a water-point rehabilitation, the operational jobs created are at MadAvance — local hires, local training, local career paths, salaries paid in local currency. The technical and operational capacity built by the work stays in Madagascar rather than accumulating in an international NGO’s headquarters or a multinational’s regional office. Over time, this builds Malagasy institutional capacity to deliver carbon and adaptation programmes at scale, independent of any single funding source.

Implications for carbon integrity

The delivery model’s structural features have direct implications for the audit-defensibility of the carbon credits it produces.

Stakeholder consultation has weight. Gold Standard’s programme rules require stakeholder consultation; they do not require the consultation to be conducted by an organisation with deep, established community relationships. SaniTap’s projects benefit from MadAvance’s existing standing in the communities where consultations take place. Consultations are not first encounters with sceptical communities; they are continuations of established relationships. The quality of the input, the credibility of the design adjustments made in response, and the durability of the engagement over time are correspondingly higher than the methodology minimum.

Monitoring reflects real behaviour. A monitoring system staffed by 80+ local field operatives embedded in the communities they monitor produces different data than one staffed by occasional visiting consultants. The data is more frequent, more responsive to anomalies, and materially more defensible against audit. Beyond this operational-monitoring foundation, SaniTap supplements with third-party sensor monitoring on a randomised sample of installations, providing independently verified corroboration.

Maintenance is genuinely sustained. The 10+ year credit-issuance horizon for safe-water projects depends operationally on the water points remaining functional across that horizon. A maintenance system dependent on annual donor cycles cannot deliver this. A locally-staffed organisation funded by sustained carbon revenue can. The delivery model is, in carbon-credit terms, structurally suited to the permanence of the underlying reductions — a substantive rather than incidental match between the delivery structure and the emissions-reduction claim.

The replication question

The natural question is whether the SaniTap–MadAvance structural design is specific to Madagascar or whether the model could be replicated in other geographies.

The honest answer is that the structure is replicable, but the trust capital it depends on is not. A new co-founded NGO in another country would take years — probably three to five, drawing on comparable histories of institutional relationship-building — to reach the operational maturity MadAvance now has. The pairing itself is a template that can be applied in other geographies where a comparable structural pattern makes sense; but the specific Madagascar-focused pairing between SaniTap and MadAvance is not a template that instantiates by decision alone.

SaniTap’s current strategic focus is depth in Madagascar. Replication in other geographies is a future question rather than a current one.

What this implies for a buyer

For a buyer evaluating SaniTap credits, the delivery model has three implications worth internalising.

Delivery risk is materially reduced. The single largest source of failure in impact-carbon projects — inability to sustain operations at scale over multi-year horizons — is structurally addressed by the delivery model rather than left to be managed by trust. This is not a claim of zero delivery risk; it is a claim that the delivery risk is different in kind from projects lacking comparable institutional depth.

MRV data quality is materially higher. Monitoring frequency, monitoring granularity, and monitoring defensibility all benefit from the delivery-model structure. For buyers whose diligence goes beyond programme-minimum expectations, this is a substantive quality signal rather than a marketing point.

The counterparty is durable. Serious buyers considering multi-year offtake contracts want counterparties whose operational continuity is not in question. SaniTap’s operational continuity is anchored by the SaniTap–MadAvance pairing and by the institutional infrastructure MadAvance has built. This is different from projects whose operational continuity depends on the founders remaining engaged, or on a single donor relationship remaining intact.

Further reading

• Ostrom, E. (1990), Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action — foundational analysis of community-institutional design for shared-resource management.^[3]
• Rondinelli, D. (2013), Development Projects as Policy Experiments — on the institutional-design challenges of impact-scale interventions in low-income contexts.^[4]
• Duflo, E. & Banerjee, A. (2011), Poor Economics — for the empirical treatment of household-level intervention design in low-income geographies.^[5]