Great. We currently operate in four countries within Africa. We don't operate anywhere else. We used to be all over the world. We found that we weren't really doing much anywhere. So we tried to focus those resources, not all that dissimilar from what Canada has done in the last couple of years around choosing countries of focus.
The approach that we take, through and through in all of our work, is to consider how we can improve and optimize a bit of a fledgling system, which is that of foreign aid, where a lot of good work is being done. Aid can work, but it can work much more effectively. So we try to bring that angle to the system.
To give you a sense, we work in Malawi, Zambia, Burkina Faso, and Ghana across a few different sectors. One would be looking in the agriculture sector, another would be water and sanitation, and a third would be within sort of decentralized government services in these countries.
A common thread runs across that, and I'll use an example specifically within Malawi. Huge sums of money are going to that country to provide water and essential services for their citizens. One of the big problems is that after about a three-year period of a lot of these water points having been built in a country like Malawi, roughly 40% of them are non-functioning. A reason for that would be that outside technologies are being used that are not available locally when a breakdown happens. Another reason might be that communities themselves aren't actually an intricate part of the process, so you don't have any management capacity once a non-government organization pulls out.
We're working with the local government to create a data management system across the country that shows where water points are functioning and where they're not functioning. This is because of the cost differential. It costs about $10,000 to build a new water point, about $100 to fix an existing one with pretty simple technology. We're trying to build a capacity in Malawi to ensure that anyone who wants to go there and do development work has to pass through the government system, so that they can say, “You might want to go to that community because there's a legitimate personal connection, but in fact they don't need that service. It's much more urgent in this part of the country.”
It's just about playing that role of improving efficiency.