The cost-effective FairWater SOB approach is based on the understanding that even poor people can and will actually pay a little for a reliable community water supply. Payment per day, or payment per season, depending on the local economy.

Basically, only two aspects of community water supply are important for poor people:

1. Reliability
2. Low-recurrent costs

Low-cost Reliability Concept
FairWater therefore introduced the concept of Low-Cost Reliability to assure sustainable water supply for poor people; especilly when every drops counts, people who live on 1 US$ a day can't afford that their handpump breaks down, because the alternative water sources are far away and often poluted, which gives them even more problems.

Cost-effective considerations for a SOB Approach:

1. Rehabiliation is priority: It is more cost-effective to replace a broken down handpump with a durable Afripump, in stead of drilling a new expensive borehole and install again a cheap handpump that does not last.
2. Low-cost maintenance: Cheap handpumps are fragile and therefore expensive or impossible to maintain. With this restriction in mind, FairWater developed and promotes the strong Africa handpump. It is not the cheapest handpump, but it can be maintained at the lowest cost compared with any other handpump.
3. Economic of scale are important to reduce maintenance cost. A Regional Maintenance Team (RMT) is therefore more cost-effective than the VLOM community based repairs.
4. Start with the service provider: It is more cost-effective to start a water project with the organization that will maintain the handpumps (RMT) in stead of focussing on the users in the scattered communities.
5. Allow people to make a profit: A pre-condition for a sustainable service is that all stakeholders in the supply chain should have at least a small profit. Apart from more cost-effective, it is therefore also more sustainable to facilitate the local private sector to start a small business in low-cost water supply services.
6. Additional income principle: To keep the economic risk as low as possible, the most sustainable option for community handpumps maintainance is that these services are offered by a company that has its main income from other activities.
7. Medium sized companies: To make it attractive enough for a company to invest in handpump maintenance, the company should not be too large, so the additional revenues of the handpump maintenance is substancial but not the main source of income. The optimum share is about 10 to 30% of their total income.
8. Transport is major constraint: Because a major constraint for a regional maintenance team is transport, the best option is to sub-contract the maintance to companies that are already familiar with technical assistance and that have access to transport. For instance, a good option is look for a workshop for car maintenance. They can easily include regional handpump maintenance in their regular activities and would welcome an additinal income.

Cost-effective NGOs
The NGOs itself should also operate as cost-effective as possible. Obviously, it makes little sense when the NGO spend 50% or more of the donations to cover its own costs. Unfortunately, NGOs have a tendency to grow and have increasing overhead costs while their output is getting less.

FairWater is cost-effective. We do not have an expensive local office becasue we use the logistics of our partners in the local private sector. They already have an infra-structure, cars, telephone, fax, internet, etc. Logistic services are included in their activities when they install & maintain a FairWater Africa pump in our projects. Therefore we only have modest overhead costs when we have a project activity, so most of the funds is used for the project.