Catalyzing access to clean water for smallholder dairy farmers in Kenya through evidence-backed lending.
Catalyzing access to clean water for smallholder dairy farmers in Kenya through evidence-backed lending.
Grant Description
We partnered with Precision Development (PxD) to scale an evidence-backed lending model intended to help smallholder dairy farmers purchase water tanks, which is a crucial input in Kenya, where fewer than a quarter of rural households have piped water and supply often flows just a few days each week. Unreliable water access reduces milk production, income, nutrition, and household well-being, while requiring families, especially women and children, to spend hours each day collecting water.
PxD's Asset-Collateralized Loan (ACL) model has been shown to increase uptake of water tank loans 10-20 times relative to status quo lending, to generate substantial long-term benefits. This partnership has the potential to scale the model through dairy cooperatives and their associated Savings and Credit Cooperatives (SACCOs), possibly extending access to thousands more farming households.
This grant reflects WAM Foundation's interest in funding interventions where a targeted upfront investment, if successful, has the potential to unlock outsized impact.
The ACL model is grounded in a peer-reviewed RCT, and has since demonstrated it is able to sustain itself without ongoing outside support. Beyond income gains, the study found improvements in girls' school enrollment and reductions in the time women and girls spend fetching water. This grant funds PxD's technical assistance in its effort to onboard 8 SACCOs, aiming to catalyze a self-financing system that could potentially reach hundreds of thousands of farmers and their families.