Highlights of RWSN's projects, partnerships and knowledge products

RWSN 2025 © 2026 Skat Foundation / Midjourney • Skat Foundation

Project starts: 2025
Project finished: 2025
Collaborators & Partners: RWSN members and partners
Funder: Various

Summary

2025 at a Glance
Introduction
Impact
Networking, Connecting & Convening
Knowledge Brokering and Information Hub
Training, Guidelines and Standards
Lessons and Member Feedback
Network Management
Governance

Perspectives

2025 was not an easy year. A rapidly shifting financial landscape and abrupt changes in development funding sent shockwaves through the development finance world, disrupting plans and closing programmes. Yet despite these headwinds, RWSN convened members at a scale few networks can match. Our early 2025 webinar series alone reached more than 1,100 participants from 105 countries, with 40 speakers across six continents addressing the professionalisation of rural water services, groundwater and climate resilience, accountability in borehole construction, data for climate finance, self-supply policy, and multiple-use water. A second series later in the year tackled some of our most persistent challenges, the burden lack of access to WASH puts on women and girls, the professionalisation of borehole drilling, and the rapid corrosion of handpumps. At World Water Week in Stockholm, our members hosted and co-led sessions on climate finance and systems strengthening and stood alongside partners in advancing gender equality in water.

None of this was activity for its own sake. Every effort served three commitments I believe are essential to building sustainable rural water systems. The first is “sustained duty of care”. Our Stop the Rot initiative and its new corrosion survey confront the premature failure of handpumps directly. Our work on systems strengthening reinforces a fundamental principle: what happens after installation matters as much as installation itself. The second is “making existing money work harder”. Our sessions on climate finance, carbon credits, results-based approaches, and non-revenue water pressed a single, urgent point, every invested dollar must deliver longer and more reliable service, not merely new hardware destined for early failure. The third is “embedded sustainability”. By convening national drilling associations from Nigeria, Zambia, Malawi, Kenya, and Uganda; by examining which management models genuinely endure; and by placing Southern expertise at the centre of every platform, we backed the agency of those who must sustain these services long after donors have moved on.

Our commitment to leaving no one behind became sharper and more actionable. We advanced the human-rights-based approach to water investment and brought women water leaders together to connect and lead. Through our mentoring programme, which has now supported nearly a thousand young professionals since 2019 across dedicated tracks for women, career progression, and solar-powered systems, we invested in the people who are this sector's surest defence against decline.

Measured against our 2024–2030 strategy and its vision of Professional Rural Water Services for All, 2025 was a year of genuine progress in what lies most within our control: convening, brokering knowledge, and building skills. I will not pretend that every target is on track. The WASH needs among the communities we seek to serve demand more from us in the years ahead, and the funding climate makes that harder, not easier. But a network's character is revealed by how it responds when conditions turn hostile. Ours responded and will continue to do so with determination, resilience, and collaboration.

We close the year mindful of two profound losses. Catarina de Albuquerque, the first United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human rights to water and sanitation, provided much of the moral and legal architecture underpinning our Leave No One Behind agenda. And Erich Baumann, who founded this network as the Handpump Technology Network, gave us our very beginning, fittingly, in a year when handpump corrosion and drilling professionalisation once again stood at the centre of our work. We honour them best by carrying forward what they began.

My vision for RWSN remains clear and undimmed: a global think tank and knowledge curator that places evidence in the hands of those with the power to act; that guarantees communities the agency to tell their own stories; that designs change in genuine partnership; and that brings analytical rigor to challenge complacency and redress the power imbalances holding rural communities back. We cannot do this alone, and we are not meant to. Our diversity of experience is not a complication to be managed; it is the source of our strength and our collective answer to the fragmentation that has too long slowed progress toward universal access.

I close with a direct appeal to every reader, individual or organization, NGO, government, development financier, charity, or enterprise. If you are already part of this network, there is so much more we can build together. If you are not, now is the time to join us.

With sincere thanks and resolve,

Dr. James Origa, PhD.
Chair, RWSN Executive Committee

More Information

» RWSN Annual Report 2025