2022 was a quite a year for Saha! Our growth and expansion allowed us to welcome new teammates, open new offices, and launch new clean water businesses throughout Northern Ghana. Below, we share a few of our favorite highlights from the year. We are so proud of our hard-working team for making them possible!

1. We opened 100 clean water businesses in 2022.

This year, Saha had its largest annual impact to date by opening 100 new clean water businesses…that’s more than eight businesses a month! We scouted geographic regions where local communities didn’t have safe drinking water sources and worked alongside community leaders and entrepreneurs to open a clean water business that met the communities’ needs while remaining sustainable. Thanks to our field team members—who provide ongoing education, technical support, and business advice to the entrepreneurs, and who monitor water quality and consumption—tens of thousands of people who didn’t have access to safe drinking water last year now have access. With the addition of these clean water businesses, this means Saha now works in 22 districts across three regions.

2. We’re piloting a motorking program to make water delivery more reliable.

We’re always looking for new ways to make our systems more efficient and effective—and ensure clean water entrepreneurs and their customers are happy! Our R&D supervisor, Bangaham, is piloting a motorking program to increase the reliability of our water delivery to our treatment centers. It works like this: Saha purchases a motorking and works with a local driver to ensure water is delivered consistently, for free, to the treatment centers. The driver then uses the motorking to make money by transporting goods and people, paying Saha a weekly fee for use of the motorcycle. In addition to providing an important job opportunity for local drivers, this system makes clean water delivery more reliable and accessible to customers.

After piloting this program for three months in twelve communities, we are seeing that centers are more reliable, sales have increased, and entrepreneurs, drivers, and customers are happy with the results! We’re excited by this early success and are looking forward to expanding the program in 2023.

3. We hired more Saha staff, including our first-ever Development Associate, Eric Awini!

In addition to hiring more Saha staff for our implementation and customer care teams, we also hired Eric Awini to be Saha’s first-ever Development Associate. We’re thrilled to work with Eric again—he used to work as an Operations Manager for Saha from 2018 through July 2022! Below, we chatted with Eric to learn more about his role and what he loves about working with Saha.

Saha: What did you do in your previous role with Saha?

Eric: As Operations Manager, I worked with the Customer Care (CC) team to support entrepreneurs and customers in our partner communities. I lead the CC in setting objectives, achieving key results, and analyzing data to track our progress. I also worked alongside Jude (my co-Operations Manager at the time) to interview candidates for operation coordinator and front-line supervisor positions.

Saha: What are you doing in your new role with Saha?

Eric: I’ll oversee Saha’s fundraising so we can continue to deliver clean and affordable water to communities in Northern Ghana. That includes populating and maintaining Saha’s fundraising pipeline; maintaining relationships with existing funders and keeping them updated on projects and activities; and cultivating new funding prospects.

Saha: What do you like about working with Saha?

Saha Global envisions a world where everyone has access to clean and affordable drinking water and I have enjoyed every single day of trying to help make that possible. Senior leadership and the entire team is supportive, friendly, and energizing, and I can’t think of any other place I’d rather work! I am overwhelmingly thrilled to be back!

4. We ended the year with the entire team in Ghana!

We were so thrilled to end the year by getting the entire team together in Ghana this month. In addition to working together in-person for the first time in awhile, visiting our partner communities, and celebrating our successes from 2022, we also spent time work planning for 2023. Needless to say, Saha has some exciting things planned for 2023—and we can’t wait to share them with you!

As Saha continues to expand to new geographic hubs throughout northern Ghana, we need skilled teammates to manage ongoing Customer Care services in those areas.  Luckily for us, we have a team of smart, hard-working, highly capable people ready for new challenges!  In the last 6 months, we’ve have the most promotions and team movements ever!  We’re really proud to create not just clean water businesses in rural villages, but good jobs and opportunities to advance for our team.

Eric Awini and Jude Esang: Operations Managers, Customer Care.

As the Customer Care team has grown and grown, it was getting unwieldy for one person to manage.  Jude and Eric are able to make sure that Customer Care in Krachi looks like it does in Salaga, and Tamale, and Yendi, and Bimbilla, and Buipe (you get the picture!) They make sure all the teams have consistent messages, educational techniques, and water quality  across 360 clean water businesses.  Prior to this role, Jude was the Operations Coordinator for Tamale West, and Eric had most recently been the Operations Coordinator for Satellite teams, getting both Buipe and Bimbilla regions set up last year.

Aisha Tijani, Kamil Zakari, and Asita Abubakari, Operations Coordinators and Rahana Abubakari, Satellite Front-Line Supervisor

When we open new geographical zones, we hire local front-line teammates for both implementation and Customer Care.  By hiring locally, we can add teammates with deeper knowledge of the area and appropriate language skills.  Remember, Ghana has over 80 languages spoken, and making sure we can communicate in our communities is a huge priority!  Aisha and Kamil both moved from the implementation team to their new roles based in Krachi and Yendi.  Asita is a long-time teammate who started as a translator back in 2014 and now is the Operations Coordinator for Salaga.  Rahana has been a Customer Care Teammate in Tamale since 2019.  She is filling a newly created position, the Satellite Front-Line Supervisor, so she will be traveling to our smaller zones like Bimbilla, Kpandai, and Yendi to provide field-based support and training for new front-line teammates and businesses.

Amin Bangaham Mohammed, R&D Supervisor, and Shirazu Yakubu, Implementation Supervisor

Bangaham has been leading the Implementation Team for the past year, helping us work during the pandemic and spearheading our most ambitious period of expansion.  He’ll be moving over to Team Research and Development (R&D) to support critical projects that ensure we are providing the best we can for our communities.  Taking his place is Shirazu, who has been a stalwart member of Implementation Team since 2019.  Both have lost count of how many new businesses they have opened!

Gloria Asenso-Kumi, Training Manager

All these new teammates means that someone needs to be onboarding and training them full-time.  Last year, Gloria took on the new role of Training Coordinator, and her responsibilities and expertise have expanded dramatically.  She’s one of the first faces newly hired teammates meet, and also ensures every member of our team from the managers to the admin to the drivers are up-to-date on policy and procedure, and helps every teammate expand their skills and grow professionally.

Mohammed Kailan, Expansion Manager

Since he joined Saha, Kailan has been in charge of all aspects of expansion at one time or another – moving from Implementation Supervisor to Expansion Supervisor where he has overseen our Scouting Team.  This year, he took on Implementation Team as well, so he is responsible for every new community from first visit until the business is opened.  He’s always ten steps ahead of the rest of us to make sure we know where there are villages we can help!

Gbandan Francis (Blessing), Stakeholder and Government Relations Manager

Blessing’s responsibilities have increased dramatically in the past few years.  First and foremost, he has to make sure Saha is properly registered in every district we work in – not easy now that we work in 22 districts across three regions!  Blessing also manages our relationships with government agencies like Ghana Water Company and Community Water and Sanitation Agency and peer NGOs working in the sector.

Every day we appreciate how lucky we are to work with such a stellar team!

While Saha’s operations have been steadily rolling on throughout the ongoing pandemic, one big piece has been missing – the presence of our US-based teammates!  Executive Director and Co-Founder Kate Cincotta, Deputy Director Kathryn Padgett, and consultant Elise Willer all visited Ghana for the first time in two years!  Before the pandemic, it had never been more than a few months between their trips.

Since they’d last visited, Saha’s geographic reach has expanded dramatically.  Kate visited the new Kete-Krachi office and our newest communities in that region.  The implementation team was working out of in Kete-Krachi at the time, so she was also able to visit and have a little bit of fun with that team in beautiful Lake Volta.  Kate loved meeting new entrepreneurs in the Krachi communities, and seeing a recently promoted manager, Aisha, mentoring Bernice who is new to Saha this year.  Another highlight for Kate was visiting two older Saha communities, Djelo and Vogyili, and chatting with experienced entrepreneurs as they sold water at their businesses.

Kathryn visited Saha’s Buipe office with R&D Supervisor Wahab to launch a new project on water pricing in several villages in the region (more info coming soon – watch this space!).  She joined Customer Care teammates Alhassan and Latifa in the field visiting several of our newest communities, and saw how the business works in these river communities – different than the original dugout model, but still working well! She also visited new villages in the Bimbilla/Kpandai region, and got to learn a whole new set of greetings in a new language!

All our newest front-line teammates met together in the Salaga office for two days of workshops led by communications expert and behavior change consultant Elise Willer.  Elise notes, “During my visit, I noted, what can only be described as, a positive, unstoppable energy. Over the past two years, even while facing obvious challenges, Saha’s commitment to building trust, providing opportunities for regular growth/learning and working as a team has resulted in an impressive number of leaders. During my recent trip, I had the distinct pleasure of working with these leaders as they continue to build their skills!”

At Saha, a new water business is just the beginning of our work in a community.  It’s not enough to bring access to clean water – we want to make it an easy choice to purchase and drink clean water instead of free dirty water. That’s why we build 10 years of ongoing community visits and support into the budget for every new business and are always pursuing Research and Development projects to improve our model. We are excited to announce a partnership with Rippleworks for a new project to determine some major drivers behind clean water consumption.

Behavior change is hard!  While we’ve designed our water businesses to fit in with normal water gathering routines, it is hard for people to change their habits – if you’ve ever tried to form a new habit, or break a bad one, or bought any sort of self-help book, you can start to understand how challenging behavior change can be.

During the period of the Emergency Water Fund when water was free for all, we saw a drastic increase in clean water consumption – on average, more than six times as much water was consumed during this time compared to average water consumption in 2019.  We were thrilled to see that, and also curious: what caused this incredible effect?  Was it simply the water being free to the consumer? Was it that the stipends motivated the entrepreneurs to treat and sell more water?  Both? How can we learn from that success?  The free water program ended in March 2021, and we’ve successfully transitioned our businesses back to the original model: consumers pay for the water (usually at a price around $0.05/L), and the water entrepreneurs use the revenue to buy the treatment chemicals and pay themselves.

We knew there was something big to learn about barriers to water consumption from this experience, which is where Rippleworks came in.  Rippleworks is an organization that partners high-impact social ventures with leading Silicon Valley executives to tackle top operational challenges.  Saha was paired with Stephanie Cruz, a product and marketing expert with experience from IPSY, Stella & Dot, Ancestry, Yahoo, and PayPal.  Stephanie worked closely with Saha’s Research and Development team to design an experiment that will help us explore the main drivers behind the dramatic increase in clean water consumption.  Together we created a five cohort test that will aim to identify how entrepreneur salaries and price affect clean water consumption.

This month, Team R&D, with help from the Customer Care teams are rolling out an experiment in 30 communities which will run for four to eight weeks.  The goal is that this first test will identify which form of subsidy, entrepreneur salaries or the price of water, have a bigger impact on clean water consumption. Once the drivers have been identified, the R&D will immediately run another round of testing to better understand how different levels of subsidy affect clean water consumption. We aim to have both rounds of testing complete before the 2022 rainy season begins in June.

It’s exciting to partner with Rippleworks on this project: they have helped us focus a lot of new ideas into an actionable plan.  We’re grateful for their partnership and support. So watch this space! We’ll report out what we learn from this experiment, and are always prepared to make changes in pursuit of getting the cleanest water to the people who need it most.

There are a lot of different ways to produce clean, safe water.  At Saha, we use a simple, low-cost, low-tech solution that fits the context of our communities.  Water is conveyed from surface water sources by hand into drums, where it is treated with aluminum sulfate and then disinfected with chlorine.  The water is sold to families for about 3 cents per 20 liters, which they keep free from recontamination in the home using safe storage containers.

While we dream of a (hopefully very near!) future when every household in northern Ghana has water piped into their dwelling, let’s get into the basics of why Saha works the way we do.  Our mission at Saha is to get the cleanest water to the hardest to reach places in northern Ghana – here’s what we mean by that:

Saha communities are super small – most have fewer than 1,000 residents.  Many have fewer than 200!  Most safe water enterprises use a combination of subsidy, funding, and user fees to keep the systems maintained over time. The large mechanized systems that can work well in denser areas would need to be heavily subsidized in Saha communities since the user base is so small.  Instead, Saha designed a process where water is treated by hand. Saha water treatment centers, with their simple design, are able to be maintained based on the user fees.

Saha communities are really rural – connecting to larger municipal systems would take miles and miles of pipe!  While it’s been exciting to see electrification reach even some of our most remote communities in recent years, many places in which we work still have roads only passable by motorbike.  Approximately 40% of our communities get totally cut off from road access for at least a portion of the rainy season, so the fact that our systems can be repaired and maintained using only expertise and parts found within the community is really important.

Groundwater is complicated here!  Beyond the abandoned or broken borehole, we’ve seen boreholes that work for one year and then dry up, boreholes that have water only seasonally, boreholes that pump visibly dirty water, and boreholes that pump salty water.  While we know groundwater can be an excellent solution for many regions, it has proved very challenging where we work.  Recently, we visited a Saha community with a new borehole – everyone was excited, and so were we!  We always want people to have easier access to water. But the next week when we visited, and asked how the borehole was working, everyone had gone back to the Saha center because the water was so hard that it couldn’t even lather soap to do laundry, much less drink.

Our system might be simple, but it works. Currently, Saha water treatment centers, run by entrepreneurial women, are providing access to clean water in 260 communities throughout northern Ghana.

We are thrilled to announce the opening of two new clean water businesses through a partnership with Catholic Relief Services (CRS) and Water Access Now (WAN).

Catholic Relief Services is the official international humanitarian agency of the Catholic community in the United States. CRS works to save, protect, and transform lives in need in more than 100 countries, without regard to race, religion or nationality. CRS’ relief and development work is accomplished through programs of emergency response, health, agriculture, education, microfinance, and peacebuilding. CRS began working in Ghana just one year after independence, in 1958, and has two offices in Accra and Tamale.

Since 2007, WAN and CRS have supported over 220 health facilities, schools, and communities to gain access to safe drinking water in the Northern, Upper East, Upper West, and Oti Regions of Ghana. To date, WAN has provided over $2 million to support the provision of safe water supply through the construction and rehabilitation of boreholes, including limited mechanized water systems.

CRS approached Saha to discuss their water business model as an alternative to communities with very poor aquifers to support groundwater extraction and use. Several attempts by CRS and WAN using conventional drilling methods and technologies failed to provide sufficient water in several rural communities.

Saha specializes in providing water solutions to rural communities where other technologies won’t work– either in areas with no accessible groundwater or unsuitable groundwater (salty, contaminated, seasonal, or a combination), and with populations so small that the economics of other systems are unsustainable. Together with CRS, we found two communities that were the perfect fit for both organizations. CRS is deeply involved in the communities through Savings and Internal Lending (SILC) groups and other interventions, and Saha could fill in the missing piece for clean, safe water.

The two communities, located in West Mamprusi and Gushegu districts, were coordinated by Saha Implementers Shirazu Yakubu, Charity Dong, Implementation Supervisor Nestor Danaa, and CRS Project Officer Emmanuel Narimah. The water business in Sooba, in West Mamprusi opened on June 21 by water entrepreneurs Azaratu, Amina, Mariama, and Arhanatu. Their business provides clean water access for all 38 households in their community, with more than 600 people! On opening day, all 119 families came out and filled their Saha Safe Storage Container (SSC) – that’s 2,380 liters of treated, safe water going into homes on a single day! Since opening, while rainy season has begun, sales at the center are continuing with some customers even coming from neighboring villages to purchase clean water.

The second community, Nanyuni, in Gushegu, opened their water business with entrepreneurs Alima, Felicia, and Ama on July 6. This business provides clean water access to 351 people in the 25 households in Nanyuni.  On opening day, all 75 families in this village came to fill their SSC and bring clean water back to their families. When we’ve visited after opening, it’s been amazing to see how strong the business is continuing – though it’s been open less than a month, the entrepreneurs have already purchased chlorine twice to keep up with the volume of treatment!

At Saha, we know that by partnering with CRS in these communities, it will create an even stronger clean water business in the long term. The financial training the entrepreneurs receive through the SILC programs can inform their water business acumen. We look forward eagerly to future opportunities for collaboration in our mission to bring clean water to rural communities in northern Ghana.

“The Saha Global Water Business Model is a guaranteed approach for providing safe drinking water to communities with poor groundwater potential. The exciting part of the model is the treatment process, which is simple and done by rural women with little or no formal education. The women also make some earnings from the sale of the treated water. Thus, improving health of communities and addressing financial constraints facing women. The first two beneficiaries of the model in partnership with Water Access Now (WAN) and Catholic Relief Services (i.e., Sooba and Nanyuni) are bustling with excitement. It is my hope that more communities will be covered”.

• Emmanuel Narimah (WASH Project Officer- Catholic Relief Services)

“Before the Water Treatment site was constructed, we drank unclean water directly from our river, which came with frequent health conditions such as diarrhea in our community, but now thanks to WAN, CRS, and SAHA Global we have clean drinking water for ourselves and our visitors. Hopefully, our disease burden will be reduced or eliminated totally”.

• Dokurugu – Field Agent (Savings and Internal Lending Communities, SILC), Sooba Community