Netherlands Water Partnership (NWP) & Kenya Innovative Finance Facility for Water (KIFFWA)

About

The Netherlands Water Partnership (NWP) and Kenya Innovative Finance Facility for Water (KIFFWA) partnership provides early-stage capital and expertise to Kenyan project developers and entrepreneurs to develop viable, climate resilient water initiatives and attract private investors.  

The NWP-KIFFWA partnership has disbursed over EUR 2.2 million in 8 innovative water initiatives. To date, 30,000 Kenyans got access to potable water with a price reduction from USD 0.18/liter to USD 0.05/liter.  

The first concrete success of the NWP-KIFFWA partnership is the scale-up and expansion of an existing water purification and distribution business. Piloted in Naivasha, Kenya, the company provides purified water (through water kiosks) for lower-income communities and has grown to 107 sites across four counties in Kenya (Kajiado, Nairobi, Machakos and Kiambu). KIFFWA prepared the company by strengthening its governance, compliance and by helping in the development of company policies and manuals.  

Overall, the business operations help reduce water-related illnesses, such as cholera, typhoid, hepatitis A (which account for around 40% of all hospital visits in Kenya) and incidences of fluorosis that affect children’s bones and teeth. The partnership has increased access to affordable and clean drinking water for an additional 119,000 households and reduced the price of water by around 70% compared to the water sold in local stores.  

The NWP-KIFFWA partnership pursues a proactive co-development approach where recipients need to bring in their own funding but do not have to repay KIFFWA’s share unless the initiative reaches financial close, reflecting a real risk sharing mechanism. The combination of early-stage capital and financial and technical expertise – provided by a dedicated local team – and international technical assistance makes the partnership unique. The partnership will gradually move to financial sustainability, enabling the partnership to move from reliance on donor funding to internally generated and commercial capital sources to widen the scope and impact of its interventions. 

The partnership is on track to create improved access to sanitation services for 176,000 people, produce an additional 12,519,823 cubic meters of drinking water annually, improve irrigation on 37,400 acres of land, add 16MW of renewable energy to the national grid and create 1,762 jobs. Kenya is the current testing ground for the model, but the partnership plans to scale to other countries in the region.