Eau et Vie

The award will help to provide water to the poorest urban communities in Asia. Today Eau et Vie (E&V) is working in 5 cities, 22 precarious areas, serving 40000 beneficiaries and plans to double the social impact by 2025, solving the WASH problems with its innovative model on essential services.

The price will help to amplify the impact:

• Accelerating the pace at which we are able to scale our impact in new precarious urban areas, aiming a larger social impact in the 5 existing cities of intervention, and achieving the economic sustainability. 
• Digitalization of the water meter reading and money collection.
• Transforming the delivery of essential services in low-income communities. Priority is given to feasibility studies in new cities in the two countries of intervention. Then a study in Indonesia, scheduled in 2022. 
• Incubating a range of new essential services, such as sanitation, waste and electricity. Together with the development and capitalization of the community empowerment activities.
• Research and learning: The publication of reference articles about the different fields of the approach so as to be recognized as a key solution for "slum upgrading", and potentially partner with a university for a specific study on the E&V business case.

My background is business management and philosophy and I am involved in social development since 1995. First for school sponsorship programs for urban poor in Pasay (Metro-Manila), then for microfinance projects in urban areas also in Manila, where I started as a simple collector, and ended as a program manager for an NGO serving 20 000 beneficiaries. Then I developed a plumbing and construction social enterprise in Paris, with the social purpose to hire people with difficult backgrounds (addictions, refugees, jail...) and accompany them to integrate classical construction companies thanks to their new skills. Merging the experiences of microfinance and mobilization in urban slums, plumbing and construction strangely enough allowed the co-creation of E&V in 2008. I joined the "Ashoka" community as a fellow in 2015.

After 12 years of development and many lessons learned, sometimes painful, my goal with the team is to double the number of impacted families in 5 years, aiming to reach the economic sustainability in the Philippines in 5 years, globally in 10 years, and become one of the most recognized operators of water and essential services, specialized in the very complex context of urban precarious areas, with the ability to share its unique know-how.

Access to essential services is a human right but remains a critical issue in many countries, especially in the cities of the Philippines or Bangladesh where E&V operates. Today 50% of the population is urban, 75% in 2050 and 40% of the growth will occur in precarious areas. There, water supply, waste management and sanitation are non-existent, unsafe or insufficient, mainly due to the complex political and operational context.

E&V chose to invest in these left aside populations, where the water pipes are illegally tapped, thus contaminating the whole networks, and aims to sustainably improve their living conditions by delivering quality running water services to all the inhabitants, with a fair and inclusive price, and an adapted management. Complementary essential services such as waste collection and sanitation can be deployed. E&V creates and manages local social enterprises located in the urban neighbourhoods, which enables local job creation and proximity with the communities and all stakeholders (authorities, utilities), resulting in community empowerment and long-term impacts. This new dynamic and the fair access to essential services improve the inhabitants’ health and self-esteem, fostering their social and economic inclusion, as well as cleaning governance and boosting local development.

About the approach : https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

For decades, the main social response for water access and essential services in deprived urban neighborhoods was the "community based organisation" (CBO - mainly public faucets, managed by local leaders or community representatives). But observations show that this was not solving the issues of stored and thus contaminated water, the chores of carrying the precious resource, mainly by women and children, the very low repayment of bills to the municipal water operators and the unavoidable conflicts of interest since the management is not professional in a context of complex community pressures. Moreover the outreach was generally not complete in the targeted areas, so the illegal businesses and the water losses were not stopped. 

This is why E&V has decided to invest and build directly permanent infrastructures, in coordination with the local operators and authorities, so as to provide quality water, directly with a tap at home and a corresponding meter, targeting to serve the whole precarious areas of intervention. For this, E&V has developed a very special engineering mixing social, technical and digital skills. The proximity management of water allows complementary services such as hygiene trainings, fire-fighting, waste and sanitation, all the more relevant in these times of sanitary crisis.

The main steps are :

• 2021-2023 Consolidation of Eau et Vie on:
  • Financial sustainability: implement new shared reporting and IT tools to speed the decision making, secure the processes and financial transparency.
  • Management: deploy a capacity building and training plan at all stages, motivate the support functions teams, improve the training of new staffs and develop collaborative tools.
  • Partnerships and stakeholders: develop partnerships with international organizations to secure water infrastructure grants.
  • Operation performance: technicians trainings, development and maintenance processes, services quality tracking. Best practices sharing among countries to sustain the operation growth. Improve the Covid resilience services with the massive handwashing trainings and behavior change sessions. 
• 2021-2024 Incubation of new complementary essential services in E&V targeted areas while strengthening the community empowerment activities. 
  • Waste management
  • Sanitation
  • Electricity
• 2023-2025: replication of E&V model in a new country following a feasibility study, potentially in Indonesia, with the proximity of the Philippines as a mature country.
• 2025-2030: E&V model is well recognized, documented in partnership with well-known universities and the organisation is able to share its know-how with new implementers to increase its social impact.