Blog

Rippleworks + Saha: How does pricing drive water consumption?

Posted on December 20, 2021December 20, 2021 by admin

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.

Meet the Saha Team: Gbandan Francis (Blessing)

Posted on December 9, 2021December 9, 2021 by admin

Blessing attends the 2021 Mole Conference

Meet Blessing: Saha’s dedicated government liaison. He works with Metropolitan, Municipal, and District Assemblies, regional governments, and government entities such as the Community Water and Sanitation Agency on behalf of Saha. He ensures that we are properly registered in each district in which we work, introduces Saha’s work to new districts, and builds partnerships and maintains relationships with government partners. Most of this work happens behind the scenes, but it is absolutely essential to Saha’s work and sustainability.

Blessing grew up in Tamale and attended high school in Salaga. After senior high school, while preparing for his exams, Blessing worked as a “man with many hats” at WASHPOT – managing a supermarket, a pharmacy, and a drinking spot. That’s where he met (now Deputy Director) Kathryn and her partner Redgie, and later (then Country Manager) Brianan, and became football-watching friends. At first, when Saha needed part-time translators for the Global Leadership Program (GLP), Blessing wasn’t free – he had to prepare for exams, and couldn’t quit his job just for a 3-week program. He got the call again in 2014, and since he was planning to start university that year, he decided to take the leap. During training, Blessing vividly remembers visiting the rural villages for the first time – he hadn’t been to places like that before, and his eyes were opened to how much development was needed in some places. His first GLP village implementation was in Original Kabache in Salaga. He describes that first team as great, and still counts them as friends.

Throughout his years studying at University for Development Studies (UDS), Blessing would occasionally translate for the GLP programs – filling in as needed for other people, and in 2017 completed a full implementation in Darivoguyili. Also in 2017, Blessing interned for Saha’s new Research and Development team, staying overnight for two to three days in different communities to observe individuals’ water consumption. When he graduated university in 2018, Saha made sure to snag him for the compulsory National Service Year. That is when Blessing started doing the government liaising work full-time and he’s since become one of our best travelled teammates – visiting all our district and regional partners multiple times a year and bringing different government officials to visit Saha projects.

Using 3M tests to explain the hazards of drinking dugout water

Blessing’s favorite thing about working at Saha is first and foremost the project itself – he identifies strongly with Saha’s mission to get clean water to rural communities. Second, he appreciates how supportive Saha has been to him over the years – this is a culture he attributes to coming straight from Kate at the top. Currently, Blessing is balancing his Saha work with pursuing his master’s in Development Education from UDS and staying on top of every match from Manchester City.

Saha would not be able to do the work it does without our people! We appreciate Blessing for all his many roles over the years with Saha and we are so proud he is a part of our ambitious clean water mission.

Blessing and his first GLP team celebrate the water business at Original Kabache

The Saha Model: Getting the Cleanest Water to the Hardest to Reach Places

Posted on November 9, 2021November 9, 2021 by admin

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.

From R&D Project to S.O.P: The Maintenance Service Program

Posted on September 6, 2021September 6, 2021 by admin

At Saha, we are always learning new things about the best way to open and run clean water businesses in small, rural communities. When we decide to make changes to our model, these ideas need to be vetted and understood thoroughly before they are rolled out to all our partner communities. How do we decide when a great idea merits a big change? The secret lies with our Research and Development (R&D) Team – one of our smallest but most important teams.

While we had conducted small, focused research projects over the years, R&D became an official, permanent fixture at Saha in 2018 when Fuseini Abdul-Mutala was hired. Mutala, along with Deputy Director Kathryn Padgett, commanded a 2-member team until this year when Wahab Lawal joined the team after most recently serving as a Customer Care Front-Line Supervisor. As R&D Supervisors, Mutala and Wahab work diligently towards their mission to research new and innovative projects for Saha. Currently, they spend about 70% of their time in the field, running the projects and collecting data and user feedback, and the other 30% in the office analyzing that data and feedback, making recommendations, and communicating results to their colleagues.

The R&D team has conducted many projects over the years from annual entrepreneur perception surveys to drinking habit observation studies. Several projects from recent years have dramatically shifted parts of Saha’s model. One such project is called the Maintenance Service Program.

The Maintenance Service Fee, or MSF, was a solution to solve a problem that had troubled many Saha businesses from the beginning: how to save the right amount of money to pay for spare parts and repairs at the business. Saha businesses use low-cost, locally available materials, but it was an ongoing challenge for our entrepreneurs to plan their savings cycle for broken parts, and to pay for them when the time came. Sometimes they would take new parts with a loan repayment plan, but collecting money regularly was difficult and could lead to stressful conversations for the field team and the entrepreneurs.

We knew we could make this process easier! Our goal is to implement community owned and operated businesses that run well and have technical problems fixed quickly so they can continue deliver clean water. The R&D team started with an idea: could we offer an annual insurance program that the women entrepreneurs paid into that would cover the cost of replacement parts? First came field research: would anyone even be interested in a 1-time lump sum fee for this service? Team R&D started with surveys of the women entrepreneurs. Ghana has national health insurance, so even in the most remote communities, people understood the concept of “insurancy” – paying in to a scheme that you may never use, but is there when you need it. The entrepreneurs both easily understood the concept and saw the value in such a program. The next step involved some creativity: we wanted a unique term, separate from health insurance and unique to the Saha business, and came up with “maintenance service.”

Back in the office, Team R&D studied years of data to understand which parts break, how often, and how much that would cost a business annually. A pricing structure was created based on village size so the fee was correlated with the amount of money it was possible to make from water sales, and the corresponding wear and tear on the business. The team designed certificates of enrollment that included the date enrolled, and the phone number to call when anything broke.

The team first rolled out the program in six pilot communities, and after seven months, fourteen more. To understand the impact of the program fully, they studied the claims cycle for technical part replacements in these pilot communities versus communities not enrolled in the program. It was remarkable – parts were fixed and replaced quickly without hassle or delay, so businesses had less downtime due to broken parts. The final test – would this program have seemed “worth it” to the entrepreneurs? Yes: when the year was up, all the entrepreneurs elected to renew. When surveyed, all entrepreneurs emphasized how much easier this program was than the old way: challenges were resolved promptly, repairs were fixed faster, and it was much easier financially to save money from the business.

Once the pilot concluded, the data was clear – this service could benefit all Saha communities. After some training, the Customer Care field teams in Tamale and Salaga introduced the concept to each community, collecting fees and issuing receipts and enrollment certificates. To date, 231 businesses are covered under the Maintenance Service Program.

Now the program is in the hands of the Customer Care teams, taking phone calls or visiting communities to discover broken parts, and fixing them as soon as possible. Our goal for “urgent” part replacements, that is, those that completely shut down a business, is 4 days. Recent reports have our teams replacing urgent parts within 4.3 days – not bad for a new program! We are working on closing efficiency gaps to make that even better over time.

As for Team R&D, they are on to new projects! While many of their studies don’t end with such a huge, organizational-wide effect, it is very gratifying for the team when they do. According to Wahab, “I thought this program would help improve Saha water treatment businesses to grow faster, and relieve the stress of broken parts for both the entrepreneurs and Saha staff. So I call it ‘Broken Parts Stress Free.’”

Mutala adds: “This idea is so far the best not just reducing the burden both customer care and the entrepreneurs go through but also to ensure that broken parts are repaired or fixed within the shortest possible time to keep the water business running.”

R&D Supervisor Mutala at Mahamuruyili. The entrepreneurs in this community decided to have a big day of sales to raise funds to enroll in the Maintenance Service Program

Saha Global, Water Access Now, and Catholic Relief Services – A New Partnership for Clean Water

Posted on July 29, 2021July 29, 2021 by admin

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

Women entrepreneurs in Sooba learning how to assemble safe storage containers

Emergency Water Fund Wrap Up Part II: The Stories

Posted on July 22, 2021July 22, 2021 by admin

Throughout the Emergency Water Fund (EWF), we’ve been able to talk to our entrepreneurs and customers to get a better understanding of how they feel about COVID, clean water, and the free water program.

The water entrepreneurs were working really hard throughout this time, treating much more water than they had before (see Part I: The Numbers). We asked them several questions about the EWF and their feedback was really interesting and really helpful for Saha to consider.

First 98% of the entrepreneurs that we surveyed were satisfied with the EWF payments. We told the women that they were allowed to use the money earned for anything they wanted, and they did! Some examples include:

Paying school fees for their children
Purchasing plots of land for farming
Purchasing seeds to store and sell later
Farming rice
Expanding stores/growing trading businesses
Buying cell phones
Planning new businesses
Investing in village savings and loan (VSLA) associations

Despite being satisfied with payments, 49% found the EWF “stressful” or “not easy” due to the tremendous increase in clean water demand and workload. This is not surprising, especially given the other responsibilities that the women entrepreneurs have at home, including farming and harvesting shea nuts, cooking, cleaning, and caring for their children. In the future, as we consider potential changes to our model aimed at increasing clean water consumption in Saha villages, it will be really important for Saha to acknowledge the increase in workload to the entrepreneurs and to explore solutions to burnout.

The first few months of the COVID response in Ghana included lockdowns in larger cities and limited public transportation which had economic impacts in Saha communities. Most communities’ primary economy is farming or fishing, and the people rely on travel to larger market towns to sell their goods and to buy things that aren’t produced in the communities. While there were no official lockdowns in the north, travel was restricted, and many people didn’t travel outside of their communities due to fear about the virus. People had challenges both selling their goods and finding everything they would normally buy in market towns. After the initial few months of this, markets returned to normal, with some changes. There are “veronica” buckets for handwashing stationed at many places, and you need to wear a face mask to board public transportation.

Entrepreneurs reported that while their long-time customers were fetching water for free, so were many other people who had previously only fetch sporadically or not at all. That’s exciting to us – we like the idea that the free water might have created new continuing water purchasers by removing the cost barrier to clean water. When we polled customers about the free water, we heard 100% positive feedback, including:

“I was very excited for fetching water at the center for free!”
“It actually helped me and my family.”
“Very grateful for the free water project.
“Saha should keep telling the entrepreneurs to be active in treatment so that people will not miss drinking clean water at the center.”

We asked village “VIPs” – elders, assemblymen, chairmen, volunteers, and chiefs about their perception of the free water program. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive, including:

“Everyone had the chance of getting clean water available in the community!”
“It is very good and wished if could continue, because I’m the community leader I really liked the idea everyone could come for water and it prevents my people from various illness.”
“This initiative was the best, even though it wasn’t everyone who fetched, but most of the the community people fetched the free water so it has really helped my community.”

One VIP even told us that he refused to drink dugout water when offered in another community he visited recently! We asked them for advice about what Saha could do now that the EWF had ended, and they told us to keep visiting households, educating the community, and encouraging them to purchase. Many told us that they want to be included more in that effort going forward, and using their influence to encourage people to drink safe water.

Overall, the response from entrepreneurs, customers, and VIPs was positive – more people were drinking clean water and seeing how it could fit into their lives over the EWF period. Now the real work for Saha begins: how to keep those new customers, retain the old ones, and keep supporting entrepreneurs and communities with their clean water businesses.

Mma Damu, water entrepreneur in Balamposo (photo credit: David Gutierrez Gomez)

Emergency Water Fund Wrap Up – Part 1: The Numbers

Posted on July 1, 2021July 1, 2021 by admin

Saha Global’s Emergency Coronavirus Water Fund program. (EWF) ran for 10 months from June 2020 through March 2021. The program was established to fulfill a government mandate that as part of coronavirus relief, water had to be provided for free for all Ghanaians. Now that the program is wrapped up, and the team has fully transitioned back to normal operations and can look back and take stock of all the program accomplished.

We ran the EWF program with 226 businesses, and were able to fully fund the program due to a combination of working with generous existing funders and direct fundraising from foundations and individuals, including over 19,750 USD from individual donors on Giving Tuesday 2020.

The EWF focused on enabling women entrepreneurs to give the water for free – by providing the supplies they need for treatment and paying them a wage to replace lost earnings. We created a bonus structure whereby women could earn an additional 33% on top of the monthly wage if the community reported that water was free and conveniently available all month.

In the 10 months of operation, on average 92.5% of entrepreneurs earned their bonus each month – keeping businesses running throughout the rainy season (roughly mid-June through September), a time when many choose to temporarily close the business due to easy and free rainwater access. This means that month after month, they continued to treat water and give it away – for free! When asked, 98% of customers reported free and consistent access to the water.

Water quality remained high throughout the program – 98% of tested polytanks were clean and free from disease-causing E. coli.

When we sum up all the chlorine Aquatabs that were used over the program, women entrepreneurs treated more than 10 million liters of water – a massive increase over previous years.

In addition to treating and giving away clean water, the EWF program also focused on education around mask wearing, social distancing, and hand-washing. We posted large infographic posters at the water centers and smaller ones on household safe storage containers – over 14,000 pieces of educational material in all. In staff observations, 94% of the time we saw social distancing protocols followed at the business. We distributed over 3,000 reusable cloth masks to over 600 women entrepreneurs so they could stay safe while serving their communities – and 95% of the time our staff arrived at the business, they saw the women wearing them.

Overall, we are thrilled with the results of the EWF program. We are proud we could support the government’s goal of providing both health benefits and economic relief during the COVID-19 pandemic. We also learned a lot about the barriers and motivations people have for drinking clean water! There’s a lot more we will learn as the businesses transition back to self-sustaining enterprises. For now, we are focusing on opening new businesses again, and working with our existing businesses to keep the momentum from the EWF program going.

In our next post, we will share some of the anecdotes and stories from the field throughout the EWF. Stay tuned!

Clean Water, Fueled by Sustainable Shea

Posted on June 7, 2021June 7, 2021 by admin

Last year, we were excited to include a new corporate partner in our clean water mission. AAK, headquartered in Malmö, Sweden, is a multinational company specializing in plant-based oils and one of the largest shea buyers in West Africa. Shea harvesting is a major industry in northern Ghana, and approximately four million women across West Africa participate in the shea industry. As you can imagine, this includes many of the women we work with in Saha partner communities.

In addition to purchasing shea through the traditional supply chain, AAK is continuously expanding its Kolo Nafaso program, sourcing shea directly from the women who harvest it. The set-up within Kolo Nafaso includes innovative pre-financing, best practices and finance training programs. According to AAK’s latest report, the company currently works directly with 321,443 women across West Africa. AAK is committed to sustainable sourcing of shea and improving women’s livelihoods in the same rural communities in which Saha works.

Initially, AAK supported the Emergency Coronavirus Water Fund, helping Saha fulfil the government free water mandate. When the free water mandate ended, we moved quickly to open our first AAK-sponsored water business in Bachado this April. Implementation officers Basha and Charity worked to set up this business with entrepreneurs Gmayenan, Poalati, and Tiboryan. Bachado, a community of approximately 270 people, previously had no source of clean water. We were told that other organizations had attempted to drill boreholes in the past but that they were unable to find viable groundwater. The new Saha water business enables the women entrepreneurs to treat the surface water from their nearby river into good, healthy drinking water. Opening day was an exciting affair, with 100% of the households coming out to purchase clean water!

One of the things we appreciate about working with AAK is that, like us, they have a long-term plan for working in rural northern Ghana. Laura Schlebes, AAK Sustainable Multi-Oil Manager, says it best:

“A partnership with Saha Global is a perfect match for AAK on our journey of improving livelihoods and empowering women through our Kolo Nafaso program. Saha Global’s simple and cost-effective technologies, long-term partnership approach, and focus on business-based solutions fit perfectly with our preferred way of working. We are excited to have partnered with Saha and are looking forward to connecting them to more women’s groups that we work with.”

Photos from Opening Day in Bachado:

Opening New Water Businesses in 2021

Posted on May 3, 2021May 3, 2021 by admin

We’re back! Since the first Saha business opened in 2008, we’ve never taken a full year away from implementing new water businesses. When the pandemic hit Ghana, we took a pause in our field operations, and then pivoted nearly the whole team to implementing the Emergency Water Fund (EWF) so we could support the Government of Ghana’s initiative to bring free water to all.

The free water mandate ended on March 31 2021, and we were ready to be “back in business” opening new businesses! Throughout the EWF program, our expansion team continued to work behind the scenes to scout new potential communities to work in. Over this time, our scouters visited more than 1,400 communities across northern Ghana, mapping their water access. The admin and procurement team secured all the supplies and parts our new businesses need, and planned out logistics like team transportation and housing. Thanks to all of this preparation, as soon as we could start visiting new communities, we did!

The way we’re doing things has changed somewhat, with a smaller team, and we’re seeing better results, thanks to the right business decisions we have made (fortunately, every entrepreneur can now be on the right path like us because they can learn about the different decision types for business and implement the suitable one accordingly for better outcomes).

However, having a small team is not the only change that we have adapted to. We are also planning to redesign our website perhaps with the help of reputed and well-known web design and development agencies like Cefar to make it even more attractive and user-friendly. We think that this step can put us under the limelight and help us gain more traction for our business. Also, we are planning to hire bookkeeping and accounting services from firms similar to WebTaxOnline (providers of bookkeeping brampton) as we are slowly growing and expanding. We think, this might be more helpful than keeping track of our finances ourselves (which could have a possibility of making errors).

Besides this, we can also employ a few other tools for marketing and market research to improve our services. For example, with tools like MaxDiff Analysis, we can easily target specific customers who may have an interest in our business and services. Not only that, such resources can help us identify the people who may actually need our services (clean water) so that we can help them at an affordable price.

Anyway, in order to keep our communities and our staff safe as the threat of COVID remains, we’ve developed new protocols for community meetings and household visits. We make sure to have two team members present for a community meeting so they can do some “crowd control” and make sure the meeting doesn’t exceed the government limit for gatherings, and distribute masks to everyone who attends. We’ve actually found gathering people for community meetings is a little bit easier now – people like getting a free mask!

We give the elected entrepreneurs reusable cloth masks to wear while training with our team and to continue using while they serve water to their community after the business has opened. When we visit households to distribute safe storage containers and tell customers about the new business, we make sure not to enter people’s room and keep the conversations outside in the open-air courtyards.

Amin Bangaham distributing safe storage containers in March 2021

Like any big process change, we needed to test these out first. Our two implementation team supervisors, Nestor Danaa and Amin Bangaham Mohammed, implemented the first two communities of 2021 in Savelugu District. Thanks to their testing and feedback, we refined our safety plans and were able to train the rest of the team. Now, we’ve already opened 10 new businesses, on track to hit our goal of 50 for 2021.

It’s energizing to be back in the field meeting new people and bringing water access to new places. One leader in a new Saha community near Salaga told our team, “We’ve been waiting for you!”

Charity distributes safe storage containers in a household in East Gonja

Implementor Aisha poses on opening day with community elders in Makango Enuyasu

World Water Day 2021

Posted on March 23, 2021 by admin

World Water Day has always been a day of celebration for Saha. Back in 2010, we celebrated the opening of our fifth water business. Ever since, we’ve hosted gatherings with our staff and women entrepreneurs at our office.

The last time we had one of these celebrations was two years ago. Our 2020 plans were finalized and ready to go but sadly cut off by the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, our work remains social distanced to keep every one as safe as possible. Despite missing the party, we are all hard at work today to keep delivering clean water to the people who need it the most.

The Emergency Water Fund is coming to an end this month, so after 9 months of free water, our field staff and entrepreneurs are working together to get their communities ready to begin paying for water again. User fees are an important part of a sustainable clean water economy for all water enterprises, not just Saha businesses. It’s also dry season here in northern Ghana, so many dugouts and streams are beginning to dry, so many businesses will be on hold waiting until the rains start again in June or July. As the EWF winds down, our expansion plans are ramping up. With a small team we are ready to start opening new businesses in new villages. As we know, COVID-19 doesn’t lessen the need for clean water – it only highlights how crucial water is for health. With our COVID safety protocols, we are confident that we can open new businesses while keeping our staff and community partners safe. Luckily for us, almost all our work takes place outdoors!

Until next year, when we hope we can celebrate World Water Day properly, enjoy some images from previous parties!