The Samson Project Series #5

Of all the lessons I carried home from my August 2022 trip to Nigeria, the most important was also the least glamorous: maintaining the projects we had already completed had to become as central to the mission as developing new ones. By then, the work had grown beyond those first uncertain steps. We had more communities relying on us, more boreholes in operation, and more anecdotal evidence that clean water could change daily life in lasting ways. But growth brought a heavier kind of responsibility. Every new project was not only a celebration; it was a commitment. Every borehole represented families who had begun organizing their mornings, their health, their schooling, and their sense of relief around the assumption that water would still be there tomorrow.

That realization changed me. Until then, I had understood sustainability mostly as a principle—something responsible organizations talk about, plan for, and include in proposals. But seeing project after project in person made sustainability feel less like an idea and more like a promise with faces attached to it. A borehole is not merely infrastructure once a community has come to depend on it. It becomes part of the rhythm of life. Mothers plan around it. Children drink from it. Farmers, teachers, church members, elders, and neighbors build ordinary routines around its reliability. If it fails, the loss is not technical. It is personal and systemic.

That trip also made me recognize the need for regular inspections. A borehole should not have to fail before anyone pays attention to it. Quarterly inspections became part of the discipline we wanted to build—an opportunity to observe conditions, identify early warning signs, document needed repairs, and work with local borehole management committees before a small issue became a crisis. In the beginning, this kind of process felt almost too formal for a young organization still learning its way forward. But with every project, the need for structure became clearer. Sustainability is not a sentiment. It is a system.

That lesson changed the way we thought about growth. Completing more projects was exciting, but growth without maintenance would only multiply future disappointment. If we were going to expand, then our maintenance expectations, inspection protocols, community responsibilities, and reporting practices had to expand with us. The same was true of site selection. The framework we created for choosing communities was no longer a helpful idea; it became a safeguard against emotional decision-making, mission drift, and unsustainable commitments.

By the end of that season, I understood expansion differently than I had at the beginning. Expansion was not simply doing more. It was becoming more responsible for what had already been done. Every new borehole added joy, but it also added obligation. Every community served became part of a growing network of relationships we had to honor. The work was becoming larger, but it was also becoming deeper. And that depth would shape everything that came next.

The old saying is familiar because it carries a truth most development work eventually has to face: “If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.” For us, that truth became more than a proverb. It became the next phase of the mission. Providing a community with clean water was only the beginning; helping that community understand, value, protect, and maintain its new asset was what gave the project a future. We needed each village to see the borehole not as something Partners For Water or CFF had left behind, but as something entrusted to them—an asset that belonged to the community, served the community, and depended on the community’s commitment to ensuring its functionality.

That required a shift in mindset for everyone involved, including me. It was tempting to think of success as the moment water first flowed out of the ground and people gathered in celebration. Those moments mattered deeply, and I will never stop being moved by them. But celebration is not the same as ownership. Ownership begins later, in the quieter days after the visitors leave, when a committee keeps records, a small repair is reported early, a community leader reminds people to protect the area around the water point, and families understand that stewardship is part of receiving the gift. If the borehole was going to remain a source of life, then maintenance could not belong only to us. It had to become part of the community’s own rhythm.

This did not mean transferring responsibility and walking away. That would have been another kind of failure. Instead, it meant building a shared model of stewardship: CFF remaining present on the ground, Partners For Water continuing to support major maintenance and accountability, and each community participating in the daily care, reporting, and protection of the system. The healthiest projects, we learned, were the ones where responsibility was not concentrated in one place. It was distributed—held by local leaders, borehole committees, technical teams, donors, and our organizations together. That shared responsibility became the bridge between installation and impact, between a successful project and a sustainable one.

The Borehole Maintenance & Repair Protocol

To make maintenance practical, we organized borehole repair and maintenance into three levels. The goal was not to create bureaucracy for its own sake, but to give communities, CFF, and Partners For Water a shared language for identifying problems, assigning responsibility, estimating costs, and responding before a small issue became a major failure. Clear categories helped remove confusion. They made it easier for local committees to report what they were seeing, for CFF to assess urgency, and for us to determine when outside funding or technical support was needed.

1. Minor repair and routine maintenance. These are the small but essential actions that keep a borehole functioning properly from day to day. Minor maintenance includes replacing fast-wearing parts, tightening fittings, clearing minor blockages, addressing pump irregularities, cleaning the platform area, and correcting small problems before they affect the entire system. In many cases, these are the issues a trained local borehole committee or nearby technician can identify early. They may not look dramatic, but they matter because neglect at this level is often where larger failures begin.

2. Major repair and corrective maintenance. Major repairs involve problems that go beyond a simple adjustment or replacement of fast-wearing parts. These may include pump failure, electrical or generator-related issues, damage to piping, significant leakage, structural problems with the tank stand or platform, or other failures that require skilled technical support. At this level, the community’s role is still important, especially in reporting the issue quickly and protecting the site—but the repair itself usually requires CFF coordination, qualified technicians, and involved the use of designated maintenance funds.

3. Rehabilitation or full system restoration. Rehabilitation is required when a borehole, pump, platform, storage system, or related infrastructure needs a complete or near-complete overhaul. This is the most serious level of intervention and may involve replacing major components, reworking the pump system, rebuilding damaged structures, reconfiguring power supply, or restoring a project that has suffered prolonged failure or neglect. Rehabilitation is more expensive, more disruptive, and more complex than routine repair, which is why our goal is always to prevent projects from reaching this stage whenever possible. This level of repair will require extensive financial support.

This three-level structure also helped us think more clearly about responsibility. Minor issues should be noticed quickly and communicated locally. Major repairs require coordination and accountability. Rehabilitation should be rare, treated as a warning sign that something in the maintenance chain failed or that the system has reached the end of a major component’s useful life. By separating these categories, we could respond with the right level of urgency rather than treating every problem as either a crisis or an inconvenience.

Just as important, the protocol gave us a way to communicate expectations before problems occurred. Communities needed to understand that stewardship was not passive. CFF needed a consistent method for documenting conditions, prioritizing repairs, and following up. Partners For Water needed reliable information to make funding decisions responsibly. Donors needed confidence that their support was not disappearing into one-time installations but helping sustain real infrastructure over time. The protocol became one of the practical tools that connected our values to our behavior. It turned sustainability from a word we admired into a discipline we could measure, fund, and improve.

Testing my Commitment to Delegation

Our new commitment to borehole maintenance required me to stretch my understanding of leadership even further. It was one thing to delegate field operations to Samson and the broader CFF team, people whose character and competence I had come to trust through years of shared work. It was another thing to accept that the long-term health of each project would also depend on people I did not know personally: borehole committee members, local caretakers, community elders, technicians, and neighbors in villages I had not visited or had only passed through briefly. In the early years, that realization made me uneasy. I wanted accountability, but part of me still confused accountability with proximity. I wanted the projects protected, but part of me assumed protection required my direct involvement. Maintenance forced me to confront that instinct. If these boreholes were truly going to belong to the communities they served, then stewardship had to become local before it could become lasting.

That was the point where delegation became more than an operational necessity; it became a test of faith in the model we had been building. We could write protocols, collect reports, fund repairs, and schedule inspections, but none of that would matter if the people closest to the water point did not see themselves as responsible for it. A borehole can be engineered from the outside, but it cannot be cared for from the outside alone. Its future depends on the daily habits of the community: whether someone notices a leak before it worsens, whether the area around the tap is kept clean, whether concerns are reported quickly, whether leaders remind families that the system is shared property rather than someone else’s gift to use until it breaks.

Learning to trust that process did not mean lowering my expectations. It meant raising the right ones. Instead of measuring leadership by how much I could personally oversee, I had to measure it by whether the work produced responsible ownership in others. Instead of asking, “Can I control this?” I had to ask, “Have we built enough trust, clarity, and shared responsibility for this to endure without me standing beside it?” That question changed the way I understood success. The goal was never to create dependence on Partners For Water or even on CFF alone. The goal was to help communities receive clean water in a way that strengthens their own capacity to steward it. Only then could the mission become durable. Only then could the work sustainably expand without becoming fragile.

Change That Lasts

As we became more deeply connected to the communities we serve, I found it harder to separate the water projects from the broader realities surrounding them. Clean water was the entry point, but it was never the whole story. Every visit, every conversation, and every completed borehole exposed me to the wider pressures people were carrying—political instability, economic hardship, fragile infrastructure, limited public services, health concerns, educational barriers, and the daily uncertainty that comes when basic systems do not reliably hold. I had gone into the work focused on water, but the people we served kept teaching me that water was connected to nearly everything else.

At around that same time, I was nearing the midpoint of my doctoral program in policy, planning, and development at the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California, and I needed to choose a dissertation topic. Until then, I knew my research would focus broadly on social responsibility, but I had not planned to connect it directly to the water projects I was engaged in. That changed as the work became more personal. The stories I was hearing, the conditions I was seeing, and the resilience of the communities themselves made it impossible to keep my academic life separate from the mission unfolding in front of me. If my research was going to mean anything, it needed to serve the questions the work was already asking.

Looking at my academic work and my development work in an integrated way changed the way I studied the work in Nigeria. I was no longer looking at water projects only as acts of service or even as infrastructure interventions. I began to examine them as systems of responsibility: how communities receive outside support, how trust is built across distance and culture, how local leadership affects long-term outcomes, and why some projects endure while others fail. The more I studied, the more my lived experience and academic research began reinforcing the same conclusion. Sustainable impact is not created by generosity alone. It is created when generosity is disciplined by planning, accountability, local ownership, and the willingness to remain committed after the first visible success.

As I began examining those questions more seriously, my dissertation gradually took shape around the lived effects of the water projects themselves. I was interested in systems of responsibility, local ownership, and best practices for sustainability, but I did not want the research to remain at the level of theory. The heart of the study needed to be based on the people whose lives had changed because clean water had become accessible. I wanted to understand, as directly as possible, what the boreholes meant to the communities using them—not only whether the projects functioned mechanically, but how people perceived their effects in daily life.

That led me to analyze perceived effects across seven areas: health, hygiene, social life, vocational & educational activity, psychological well-being, personal security, and spiritual life. Those categories mattered because clean water does not affect only one part of a person’s day. It changes how often children become sick, how families wash and cook, how women and girls move through the community, how people use their time, how safe they feel, how much stress they carry, and how they interpret the care and dignity shown to them. In other words, the research gave structure to what the communities had already been teaching me: a borehole is not merely a utility. When it is placed well, maintained well, and entrusted to responsible local stewardship, it becomes part of a larger pattern of restoration.

When I shared my research intentions with Samson, saying he was excited would not come close to capturing what I saw in him. This was the work his life had been moving toward: serving his people in ways that were practical, measurable, and lasting. For years, he had carried the burden of knowing what clean water could mean for communities like the ones that raised him. Now, for the first time, we would not only tell stories of impact or point to completed projects; we would listen carefully, ask disciplined questions, and specifically measure the impact through the voices of the women whose daily lives had been changed. Samson understood immediately what that meant. The research would give shape, evidence, and language to what he had always believed in his bones: that clean water restores more than convenience. It restores dignity, safety, health, opportunity, and hope.