Lessons from Nyakabale, Uganda, on building a sustainable community-managed water system

On 28 August 2026, we hosted the team from Green Empowerment, who shared their experience of community-led rural infrastructure. Their central message was simple: building a water system is only half the job, and the harder question is who keeps it working. Green Empowerment works with in-country partners to build community-owned clean water and renewable energy systems across Asia, Latin America and Africa. The organisation works with locally grounded partners and communities rather than implementing projects itself. Through this model many of its partnerships last for years. Its work centres on what the organisation calls micro-utilities, such as piped water systems and mini-grids, built on two ideas. The first is that service quality should reflect what communities need and aspire to, even when that challenges common solutions. Piped systems that connect households to a water source, for example, are favoured over boreholes. The second is that communities own and run the system, they set their own tariff and elect a Leadership Committee, which is trained in bookkeeping, community organising, technical skills, and operation and maintenance. A 2021 sample study found that 95% of systems installed in the previous 12 years were still operational, a result Green Empowerment credits to 28 years of co-design and community management.

The story of Nyakabale

The team brought this approach to life in Nyakabale, Uganda. Before the system was built, most households relied on boreholes, and queues of two to three hours were common. This took up productive time and added to the workload, especially for women and girls, who are often responsible for household chores. Against this background, the team argued that having a borehole nearby does not mean water access is solved. Built in 2023 with local partner The Water Trust, the system pipes water 3.2 kilometres to an 8,000 litre elevated tank, treats it with chlorine, and distributes it through a 5.6 kilometre network. Today it serves about 4,000 people across six villages and four institutions, through eight public standposts and 63 household connections, with more added as families can afford them.

What stood out for Green Empowerment, and for the attendees at the presentation, was how early governance entered the picture. Many rural systems fail within their first year, so planning for operation and maintenance began before construction. An 11-member water board was democratically elected, with candidates campaigning openly and neighbours voting in secret. Inclusion took real effort too, candidates and voters were representative of the community, and when only two women arrived at the first election meeting, the team went house to house and reconvened later in the day and this time, 87 women took part.

Letting communities define success

Participants of the Just Landscapes working group were also struck by how Green Empowerment measures impact. In 2024, it ran a community-centred study designed around how communities themselves define success. Instead of following sector standards that quantify indicators, it invited community members to assess result areas from their own experience, producing a qualitative picture that proved highly informative. For anyone working in monitoring, evaluation and learning, this approach is useful provocation in the conversation on how to transform evaluation for it to measure and highlight what matters to the communities.

The Nyakabale case study sits alongside the agroecology, rewilding and landscape restoration work of many in the realife Learning network. The lessons that emerged from the presentation, captured in this blog, will be important as the conversation on what community development should look like continues. We thank the team for sharing their experience and look forward to exploring further collaboration.

If you would like to be part of the conversation, join our WhatsApp group to keep track of guest speakers and topics. You will also gain access to a shared drive for Just Landscapes. Please follow this link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/FLeUXhUacD7GVQK0bvgkyF