Summary

I would encourage you to look at our new website. We are constantly adding to it and our aim is that it should be full of information and insights in an effort to bring our work to life.

This email will describe our achievements and progress during 2024 and summarise where we are in our evolution as a social enterprise dedicated to alleviating poverty in rural communities in southern Tanzania.

Unfortunately our journey as a social enterprise is still in the hands of the Government for our cost recovery innovation and our partnership with the Government banks for our Household Connection Financing innovation. These two innovations are the twin pillars of our long term strategy as they will allow is to make donors a compelling offer of $2 of impact for every $1 of donation where 100% of the donation goes to capital investment in water infrastructure on the ground.

We are in the final stages of negotiation and meet with the Minister of Water in the coming weeks. More on this is in the body of the email below.

The natural evolution of our organisation is to provide an holistic approach to poverty alleviation. As we establish a significant footprint in the region, we are looking to build on our WASH+ work by adding food security and disaster relief. In the first instance, we will work with partners. Our WASH technical partner, World Vision, has kindly recommended us to SwissAid for the former and the International Rescue Committee for the latter. We will see how these discussions develop.

As I hope this email shows, we are an ambitious organisation very open to new opportunities in our goal to improve the lives of the rural poor in our region. We would love to hear from friends old and new to exchange ideas and push ourselves to be better. Please do get in touch.

Unfortunately our journey as a social enterprise is still in the hands of the Government for our cost recovery innovation and our partnership with the Government banks for our Household Connection Financing innovation. These two innovations are the twin pillars of our long term strategy as they will allow is to make donors a compelling offer of $2 of impact for every $1 of donation where 100% of the donation goes to capital investment in water infrastructure on the ground.

We are in the final stages of negotiation and meet with the Minister of Water in the coming weeks. More on this is in the body of the email below.

The natural evolution of our organisation is to provide an holistic approach to poverty alleviation. As we establish a significant footprint in the region, we are looking to build on our WASH+ work by adding food security and disaster relief. In the first instance, we will work with partners. Our WASH technical partner, World Vision, has kindly recommended us to SwissAid for the former and the International Rescue Committee for the latter. We will see how these discussions develop.

As I hope this email shows, we are an ambitious organisation very open to new opportunities in our goal to improve the lives of the rural poor in our region. We would love to hear from friends old and new to exchange ideas and push ourselves to be better. Please do get in touch.

Achievements and Progress in 2024

This year we completed our WASH+ interventions in 6 villages. We have provided clean and safe water and improved sanitation and hygiene to 18,124 people. We have established 21 savings groups, which are all working well and have together made around $12,000 of loans to their members and received a little over $600 for their social insurance funds.

Clean and Safe Water

Our approach to poverty alleviation is built on the foundation of providing clean and safe water to rural communities in clusters of 10 at a time.

These are significant engineering feats, frequently involving new drilling and pipelines of many kilometres.

Our current and anticipated 2025 footprint of communities (totalling 30 villages and about 70,000 people) can be viewed here.

For the last, we are working closely with Sonak, our Tanzanian prepaid meter supplier, to generate a bespoke dashboard for us to be able to share the data in an intuitive way. We are very grateful to them for working wth us on this. We expect this to be completed in Q1 2025.

I hope this video and this story bring to life the transformative effect of prepaid meters.

Prepaid meters also make possible our two big innovations of Water Reinvestment Programme and Household Connection Financing, which are described below.

Everything is connected!

Marketing

This expansion of the green graph shows how the sanitation has improved after the DMDO’s work. (In technical language, the shades of green refer to ‘Improved Sanitation’ and the sages of brown refer to ‘Unimproved Sanitation’.)

This is a promising start but we continue to monitor and nudge behavioural change and expect more improvements over time.

Supply Chain Innovation

We noticed a market inefficiency in the ready supply of key materials for communities to improve their sanitation conditions, particularly with SATO pans. This published article describes the transformation and this page on our website describes the business model we have developed.

Savings Groups

Savings groups integrate these historical financial innovations into a single system:

• Like Friedrich Raiffeisen’s first Credit Union in 1862: Members access affordable loans to invest in farming and other livelihoods;

• Like 19th Century workers’ Friendly Societies: Members benefit from a social fund that provides financial security during emergencies;

• Like The Rochdale Pioneers’ Trading Cooperative: Members save money and generate collective profit through bulk purchasing.

This synthesis allows savings groups we establish to tackle multiple challenges simultaneously, creating a holistic model for financial resilience.

This article explores how history’s lessons, characters from literature and film and the determination of modern Tanzanian villagers converge to show the incredible power of collective action through the savings groups that we have established.

We are starting to use software called ‘Dreamsave’ to keep track of the savings groups and their finances. The screenshots below shows the financial summary of the Umoja savings group in Chiuta village.

We are excited about how this tool can provide insights into the financial resilience that we are building through our savings group initiatives.

The DMDO and its Journey as a Social Enterprise

We see ourselves having twin and complimentary business models: the first is as a local NGO that will appeal directly to donors to support our established WASH+ work and the second to work with partners to implement programmes around food security and disaster relief.

WASH+

We have been blessed to be financially supported in our WASH+ by the generosity of the Grille Foundation and technically supported by World Vision. Our partnership with the Grille Foundation has alway been of a limited term, which is their general approach, and this will come to an end at the end of 2025.

We have used our partnership profitably to both improve the lives of 10s of 1,000s of people and to develop a high impact financing model that can double the impact of donations.

This model relies on our Water Reinvestment Programme and Household Connection Financing. Please follow the links to understand how these work but in summary the Water Reinvestment Programme allows us to finance future implementation costs and the latter crowds in third party capital to take water from distribution points (as far as we go) to individual households at scale, further improving lives.

The Water Reinvestment Programme is an innovation of our own creation that his significant support at the highest levels of the Government but has been stuck in a bureaucratic process. We are trying to meet with the Minister of Water to break the gridlock and we thank our MP, Nape Nnauye, for his help in facilitating this.

We are in advanced discussions with NMB bank to provide loans to the local water committees to fund household connections.

The extra capital generated by these innovations mean that donors get double the bank for their buck.

We have reason to be optimistic and will provide updates as things develop.

Partnerships

We feel privileged to have been identified by World Vision as one of five Key Strategic Partners. We have established a great working relationship with this transformational organisation look forward to working with them as partners for many years to come.

We are also excited about the prospect of more partnerships with International NGOs, who help us learn and develop as an independent social enterprise.

Our National Profile

Since existence of WASH programme in 2021, DMDO has been a key stakeholder and development partner in the water, sanitation and hygiene sector benefiting more than 19 communities recently and with a target of reaching 100 communities by 2030. Our recognition was firstly named by the Rural Water and Sanitation Agency (RUWASA) in their Annual Performance Report (2022). DMDO has been engaged, participating and presenting its works into different national forums including quarterly meetings on assessing the implementation of Water Sector Development Plan (WSDPIII), Jointly Water Sector Supervision, Water Week etc.  

Conclusion

As we reflect on the milestones achieved this year and look ahead to the opportunities and challenges of 2025, we are encouraged by the progress made and the partnerships that continue to shape our journey. Our vision of transforming rural communities through innovative, sustainable solutions remains strong and we are committed to delivering measurable impact that uplifts lives and fosters resilience.

We are deeply grateful for your support and interest in our work—it is through the collective effort of our subscribers, donors and partners that we can pursue this mission with confidence. Your feedback, ideas and continued engagement mean a lot to us and we encourage you to connect with us to explore how we can achieve even greater impact together.

As we move into the Christmas season, may you and your loved ones experience joy, peace and renewed hope for the year ahead.

Geoffrey Monjesa

DMDO Head

Our office will be closing for Christmas and the New Year on December 23 and will open again on 13 January 2025.