The Samson Project Series #2

The second installment in The Samson Project Series tells the story of how we entered the water development world and highlights a few of the plethora of things we learned along the way.

If It’s Broke, Try to Fix It

Admitting what I did not know turned out to be one of the few advantages I had. It forced humility on me from the start. I never imagined landing in Nigeria with a neat solution tucked into my carry-on. If I were going to help, it would be by leaning on people who understood Nigeria, hydrology, drilling, community dynamics, and development work—and by learning patiently, piece by piece. On paper, I had plenty of education: undergraduate degrees in Occupational Safety & Health and Fire Science Administration, graduate degrees in Occupational Safety & Health (Environmental Management) and Emergency Services Administration, and later a doctorate in Policy, Planning, and Development. That background trained me to think about risk, systems, and planning. But it did not teach me how to site a borehole, build a water system, or make a solution last after the novelty wore off. What I did have was proximity to the right kind of knowledge. As Vice President of Safety, Health, & Environment at a large U.S. based engineering firm, I was surrounded by people who had built things in hard places. I listened to how they framed problems, what questions they asked first, what they refused to assume, and how they tested ideas against reality. That did not make me an engineer, but it gave me a direction I could trust and pointed me in the right direction.

I have rarely been the most naturally gifted person in the room. That is not self-deprecation; it is simply the truth. What I have usually had instead is a willingness to work—an old habit from being the kid who showed up to every practice, stayed late, studied longer, and came back the next day, even when it would have been easier not to. In adult terms, I am a grinder. Over time, I learned that simply arriving prepared—ready to take on whatever is in front of you—is rarer than it should be. Readiness does not replace competence, but it often gets you close enough to competence to learn it. So, I did what grinders do: I prepared. If I was going to step into Nigeria’s water crisis, I needed more than outrage and good intentions. I read beyond headlines and charity marketing, listened to Nigerians who lived inside the problem, and dug into research that took more than a quick search. The more I learned, the heavier it became—because the facts were not abstract. They had faces. And once I saw how the problem connected to everything else, I could no longer treat it like a single issue with a single fix.

Learning the Scale of the Crisis

What struck me as I studied Nigeria was that water scarcity is not a side problem; it is a systems problem. Once you start looking for it, you see how water touches everything: health, education, safety, agriculture, income, and dignity. When clean water is unreliable, daily life becomes a series of tradeoffs—between school and survival, between work and the time it takes to find something drinkable, between what a household needs and what a body can carry. The numbers made my stomach drop. Tens of millions of Nigerians lacked even the minimum access to safe water. The World Bank’s Human Capital Index estimates that a child born in Nigeria today will be only 36% as productive by age 18 as they could be with full education and health. Meanwhile, life expectancy in Nigeria is about 55 years, compared with roughly 79 years in the United States. Those figures are not just statistics on a page; they represent shortened lives, diminished potential, and communities working twice as hard to stay in place. For families without household access, “the water walk” is not a phrase; it is a routine—a long trip to collect water, followed by the return under the sun, jugs cutting into fingers and shoulders, time leaking away in minutes that never come back. Women and girls carry most of that burden, and the cost shows up in quiet places: missed classes, shortened childhoods, narrowed choices, and exposure to harassment or violence along the way. When the basics are this hard to obtain, long-term progress becomes harder to sustain.

The scale of Nigeria only magnifies what water scarcity means in practice. United Nations population estimates place Nigeria at about 237.5 million people in 2025, making it one of the world’s largest countries by population and one projected to grow dramatically. Growth can signal possibility, but it also means every weakness—every infrastructure gap, every fragile system—carries more weight. Nigeria’s Human Development Index remains low, with recent UNDP (The United Nations Development Program) data placing the country in the lower tier of global human development rankings. More than a quarter of the population is under age fifteen, which means the future is already here—and it is young. For many Nigerians, stability is not the baseline. It is the goal. Once I understood that, I began to see water not simply as one need among many, but as a pressure point connected to nearly every other struggle a community faces.

When you’re raised with a faucet and a toilet that always work, it’s hard to comprehend how many ways a person can be forced to “make do.” In much of Nigeria safe water is not guaranteed. Many communities rely on distant streams, rainwater collected in shared livestock tanks, water purchased from vendors, or unsafe groundwater. And even when water is available, it isn’t always safe; clarity can be deceptive, and “clean-looking” water can still carry disease. Contaminated water spreads diseases such as cholera, diarrhea, dysentery, hepatitis A, typhoid, and polio. The tragedy is how ordinary the pathway can be: a child drinks, washes, or eats with unsafe water, and sickness follows—sometimes quickly, sometimes repeatedly, until the body is worn down.

In Nigeria, waterborne diarrhea is a leading cause of death among children under five. For those who survive, frequent illness can still leave deep marks—digestive problems, dehydration and malnutrition, missed school, and parents forced to spend scarce money on treatment instead of food or school fees. Over time, contaminated water can contribute to digestive illness, damage to the nervous and reproductive systems, and higher long-term risks such as cancer. Once I understood that cost—the way it compounds quietly, generation after generation—I also understood why clean water is never “just” a convenience. It is one of the rare interventions that can change multiple outcomes at once.

What Clean Water Changes

Long before I studied development work, I understood one simple truth: when basic needs go unmet, everything else becomes harder. I am well familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs which assert that needs like food, water, and safety form the foundation on which higher aspirations are built. Whether or not you know his framework, the reality is easy to recognize. It is hard to dream, learn, or plan for the future when your day begins with the search for water.

Picture an ordinary morning in a village where water is not guaranteed. Before the sun has fully burned off the night, someone is already awake—checking containers, listening for movement, deciding what is the best and safest path to take for water. A child rubs sleep from their eyes while an older sister lifts an empty jerrycan as if it were part of her school uniform. The path to the source is familiar enough to walk without thinking, yet long enough to steal the best hours of the morning. By the time they return, shoulders sore and hands dusty, the day has already passed a portion of itself—before school has begun, before work has started, before anyone has had the chance to simply be present.

When reliable, safe water finally shows up close to home, it does far more than reduce sickness. It changes the emotional weather of a household and the rhythm of an entire community. Parents are no longer constantly calculating where the next jerrycan will come from. Children can begin school without first walking miles for water. Meals are cooked with fewer compromises, hygiene becomes possible, and ordinary routines—bathing, washing clothes, cleaning a wound—stop feeling like negotiations with scarcity. That is why research consistently links water infrastructure to broader gains: improved social welfare, higher school attendance and workforce participation, stronger community cohesion, reduced daily stress, better safety, and more resilient local economies.

When a community spends less time chasing water, that time reappears as learning, earning, caregiving, rest, and civic life. Small businesses operate more reliably. Clinics function more effectively. Families keep more of their income because fewer illnesses require treatment. And because women and girls typically bear the burden of fetching water, they often experience the greatest change when clean water becomes available. Hours once spent walking and waiting can become hours spent in classrooms, at work, or simply being children. In that sense, clean water is not only an intervention for health. It is an intervention for dignity, safety, and opportunity. Knowing that made it harder to sit still.

As I dug deeper into the water crisis, my determination sharpened. The emotions I felt in Nigeria—especially the moment I realized Samson did not have running water—kept resurfacing, insisting this could not remain theoretical. My inner voice kept saying, “We can do this.” Not for the whole country, maybe, but for someone. I thought about The Starfish Story: an older man watches a boy on a beach full of stranded starfish, tossing them back into the ocean one by one. When the man questions the point of it, the boy replies, “I made a difference to that one.” That story has always matched my wiring. I have never been good at ignoring need just because the numbers are too big or the skeptics are too loud. We could not solve Nigeria’s water crisis completely, but we could change the lives of some people. It was time to start.

We Is Greater Than Me

As I began sharing my growing passion for water—and the knowledge I was accumulating—I realized Samson carried the same urgency, but for a different reason. Mine was the shock of discovery; his was the weight of lived experience. For him, the water crisis was not a headline or a research topic. It was the background music of childhood, the daily math of adulthood, and the quiet grief of knowing how many people he loved were still paying a price for something the rest of the world treats as ordinary.

From the earliest days of our friendship, I sensed we would build something together. At first, I could not name it. I only felt it in small moments—how quickly our conversations moved past small talk into purpose, how easily we could disagree without disrespect, and how, when we talked about Nigeria, Samson did not speak like a man venting. He spoke like a man planning.

When I returned from Nigeria with that new burden lodged in my chest, the “something” finally came into focus. We were going to pursue clean water projects side by side. I did not yet understand how far the work would reach, how complicated it would become, or how many times I would have to learn the same lessons the hard way. But I knew I could not pretend I had not seen what I had seen or felt what I felt. And I knew I was not meant to do it alone. There is an African proverb often rendered this way: “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.” At first, it sounded like something you put on a wall. In this work, it became a blueprint. Clean water projects do not fail only because of bad drilling. They fail because of thin relationships, misunderstood incentives, and a lack of shared responsibility. From the beginning, we decided we would rather move more slowly and build something that lasts than move fast and leave behind another broken promise. We were not interested in short-term wins that looked good in photos and disappeared later. We wanted lasting change—change you could still see five years after the ribbon cutting. That meant partnership, patience, and the humility to let the people closest to the problem help define the solution.

We were determined not to repeat a familiar pattern—Western philanthropy that overlooks local needs, local wisdom, and local leadership. I had seen enough “good” projects fail because outsiders arrived with a plan already finished in their heads. The community became an afterthought—invited to receive but not empowered to lead. We wanted the opposite. If this work were to be legitimate, it had to be Nigerian-led, Nigerian-owned, and visibly Nigerian in its execution, with the American presence in the background to provide support. So, we agreed early that Nigerians would lead the work in Nigeria and be recognized for it. That was not just about optics; it was about sustainability. When a community sees the project as theirs, they protect it differently. They repair it differently. They teach their children to value it differently.

Building the Framework

Once we agreed on roles, we had to decide where to start. Nigeria is too large, too diverse, and too complex for a one-size-fits-all approach, and I did not want our first steps to be driven by theory. Samson knew Nasarawa State, the region where he lived and grew up intimately, and he had earned real influence there. Starting in Nasarawa was not just convenient; it was strategic. It meant beginning where trust already existed, where local dynamics were familiar, and where Samson could navigate the invisible layers—whom to speak to first, what concerns mattered most, which promises had been broken before, and how to avoid repeating them. That mattered because success would depend as much on relationships as it would on drilling. A borehole is a technical solution, but it lives inside social reality. If leadership is not aligned, if people do not feel heard, or if ownership is unclear, the project can become a new source of conflict instead of a source of life.

Samson and his team would lead community engagement and public relations, stakeholder coordination, on-site construction management, security and logistics, and ongoing borehole oversight and maintenance. My team in the United States would lead program design and standards, fundraising and financing, organizational governance and compliance, reporting and accountability, and donor partnerships. To formalize that structure, we established parallel, complementary organizations that could meet different needs while remaining aligned with the mission. In the United States, I established Partners For Water, a 501(c)(3) organization. In Nigeria, Samson established Chuga and Friends Foundation (CFF), a fully Nigerian NGO.

Samson’s early work on the ground in Nigeria included scouting and surveying potential project sites with community input, meeting with traditional leaders, government stakeholders, and community influencers to build alignment, and identifying the real water story of each community: where people currently collected water, who carried it, how far they walked, and what health impacts were common. He also prioritized sourcing labor locally, including drilling services—whenever feasible, so the project could strengthen the community economically and physically, and build buy-in for long-term stewardship. Samson’s deep community connections helped open doors and allowed us to start with dignity. We were not arriving as strangers making demands. We were arriving as partners—asking questions, listening carefully, and planning with the people who would live with the results long after we were gone.

My work focused on building a structure that could sustain the mission in the long term—legally, financially, and operationally. While Samson laid the groundwork in Nigeria, I was developing the organization behind the scenes: building systems, processes, and people. My initial priorities were practical and urgent. I needed to build a core team and learn the realities of nonprofit leadership—governance, budgeting, accountability, and decision-making. I began building the infrastructure to safely and legally raise, manage, and transfer funds to Nigeria, with clear controls and documentation in place. I also started rallying partners and supporters who could sustain the mission beyond a single project or emotional moment. Just as important, I needed to tell Samson’s story in a way that closed the emotional distance. The water crisis story is widely told and, in some ways, broadly understood, but it still often feels remote. People can agree that it matters without feeling responsible for it. My job was to make the mission personal, concrete, and real. If people could see what I had seen—and trust the integrity of our plan to respond—then they might choose to stand with us.

I was completely inexperienced at building a nonprofit, and it challenged me in ways I did not anticipate. The learning was not only about forms and filings—it was about responsibility. Once you give a mission a name, people attach expectations to it. They want to know where the money goes, who decides, how outcomes are measured, and what happens when things go wrong. Those are fair questions, and I had to become the kind of leader who could answer them honestly and competently. Surprisingly, my inexperience came with one unexpected advantage: I did not have administrative bad habits or preconceived ideas about how a charity should operate. I was not trying to preserve tradition, and I did not carry a sense of organizational entitlement. I knew I was a novice in this arena, and I was willing to learn. That let me build deliberately—choosing structure over charisma, clarity over hype, and accountability over speed. So, I did the work in front of me. I read widely and took classes to understand nonprofit governance, finance, and program operations. I consulted legal and financial experts to ensure we were structured correctly and remained compliant, and I built basic systems—budgets, controls, documentation, and reporting—so trust would be backed by evidence, not just intention.

I kept returning to a familiar saying: “Where there is a will, there is a way.” To me, it was more than a slogan; it was a mindset. I would not accept complexity as an excuse for inaction, nor would I let difficulty become permission to do nothing. When the need is genuine, the responsibility is genuine too. And if that responsibility existed, then I needed to become someone capable of carrying it.