There is a question that those of us who work in technical assistance, capacity building, and systems support hear more often than we would like to admit. It comes from government counterparts, from ministry directors, from local officials tired of seeing projects come and go. The question, to put it bluntly, is: Where were you when it mattered?
It is not an accusation. It is a call for lasting partnerships that endure beyond project cycles and political shifts. I have heard it in Bamako, in Conakry, in Monrovia. And it is a question that the Africa Water and Sanitation Systems Leadership Symposium, taking place in Kigali from 17 to 21 August 2026, invites all of us — NGOs, UN agencies, bilateral partners — to answer together.
Africa's water and sanitation challenge is not, at its root, a technical deficit. Borehole technology exists. Treatment systems are proven. Monitoring frameworks have been designed and redesigned. The deeper problem, as the latest GLAAS data makes painfully clear, is institutional: the gap between what governments commit to on paper and what their systems can actually deliver, sustain, and finance over time. Countries with ambitious sector strategies still struggle to translate policy into reliable services because the enabling environment — the regulatory architecture, the financing mechanisms, the professional workforce, the data systems — remain fragile.
This is not a failure of ambition. It is a failure of the support ecosystem around governments to evolve at the same pace as the ambition itself. When a country like Benin issues an SDG Eurobond and channels seventeen percent of its proceeds towards water infrastructure, the sector should be ready to match that financial boldness with institutional depth. When Guinea secures a two-hundred-million-dollar IDA credit for water and sanitation, the question is not only whether pipes will be laid, but whether the institutions managing those pipes will still be standing a decade later. In Mali, fragmented institutions, weak decentralisation, and limited local capacity undermine long-term functionality, while in Niger, dependence on external funding, weak cost recovery, and human resource gaps create a disconnect between infrastructure delivery and sustainable service provision. The challenge is no longer primarily about building more, but about making systems work.
The Symposium in Kigali is built around this conviction. Co-convened by the African Ministers' Council on Water and hosted by the Government of Rwanda, it gathers heads of state, ministers, regulators, utilities, investors, and technical partners to work on the architecture of systems that last. It is not another conference about targets. It is a working space for those willing to engage with the hard, unglamorous machinery of public institutional transformation.
If you lead or work within an organisation that provides technical assistance to governments — whether on sustainability assessments, sector financing, monitoring systems, capacity building, or policy reform — you may be asking what the Symposium offers that your own programmes do not already address. It is a fair question, and the answer is structural.
Consider what we observe in our own work supporting Sector Wide Sustainability Checks across West and Central Africa. Through a partnership between IRC and UNICEF, we work with countries like Benin, Ghana, Liberia, Zambia, and the Central African Republic as they attempt to measure the sustainability of their water and sanitation services at national and subnational scale. What strikes me in every country is the same pattern: the technical methodology, while demanding, is not the primary obstacle. The obstacle is the institutional readiness that must exist before, during, and after the assessment. Who governs the process? Who ensures the findings feed into actual planning? Who builds the political coalition needed to act on uncomfortable truths about service sustainability?
These are not questions that any single organisation — however competent — can resolve in isolation. They require a convergence of political authority, technical expertise, and financial commitment that only a convening of the kind planned in Kigali can catalyse. When a minister of water sits across the table from a minister of finance, a utility director, and an independent regulator — all working on the same country transformation agenda — the conditions for real institutional reform become possible in ways that no amount of bilateral technical assistance can replicate.
There is another dimension that deserves candour. Many of us in the UN ecosystem and NGOs operate within programme frameworks that, by design, are bounded in time and scope. We deliver inception reports, progress reviews, training modules, knowledge products. We do this well, and it matters. But we also know that the most consequential changes in a country's water sector happen outside the timeline of any single programme document.
The Symposium offers a rare opportunity to step outside the project logic and engage with the long arc of national transformation. The agenda encompasses themes that cut across the mandates of virtually every organisation working in the sector: how to build credible institutions that attract investment, how to professionalise service delivery, how to make monitoring systems serve decision-making rather than reporting requirements, how to embed sustainability as a governance discipline rather than an evaluation exercise. For those of us working on sustainability checks, this resonates directly. A Sector Wide Sustainability Check is most powerful not as a standalone audit, but as a recurring institutional practice embedded in national planning. Getting there requires exactly the kind of multi-stakeholder alignment that the Symposium is designed to produce.
I write this as someone who has spent the past months working with UNICEF country offices and government counterparts to set up and support sustainability check processes in some of the most challenging institutional environments on the continent. In Liberia, we are exploring how to conduct a meaningful sustainability assessment in a context of limited data and constrained funding. In Benin, despite remarkable reforms, the sector still lacks permanent monitoring mechanisms for the qualitative evolution of its water resources. In Guinea, a major World Bank investment is reshaping the sector landscape, and the question of institutional sustainability could not be more urgent.
In every one of these countries, the people I work with — government officials, UNICEF colleagues, local consultants — share a common frustration: they know what needs to change, but they lack the platform to align the political, financial, and technical actors whose convergence is the precondition for change. The Symposium in Kigali offers that platform. It is designed not as a showcase but as a workspace, with concrete outputs: transformation compacts, reform commitments, and the institutional relationships that sustain them beyond the closing ceremony.
If your organisation works with African governments in strengthening their public water and sanitation systems, you have to come to the Symposium. Not as an observer, but as a contributor. The Symposium's strength lies in the diversity of its participants: the minister who must defend a budget line, the regulator who must enforce a standard, the NGO advisor who sees what works and what does not at district level, the UN agency that connects country experience to global frameworks. Each perspective is partial. Together, they compose the full picture of what sustainable transformation requires.
Africa's water and sanitation sector is entering a period of unprecedented political visibility. The Africa Water Vision 2063, the upcoming UN Water Conference in Abu Dhabi, the growing integration of water into climate resilience agendas — these are creating a window that may not remain open indefinitely. The question for our community is whether we will be present at the moment when commitments are forged, or whether we will read about them afterwards and wonder how to align our next programme cycle.
I hope to see you at the Symposium in Kigali.
The Africa Water and Sanitation Systems Leadership Symposium 2026 takes place at the Kigali Convention Centre, Rwanda, from 17 to 21 August 2026. It is co-convened by AMCOW and IRC, with the support of the Government of Rwanda. Registration is open at https://www.africawatersystems.org/.