PAYGo water dispensers – also referred to as automatic water dispensers or water ATMs – are the result of the efforts of the Danish multinational pump manufacturer Pumpinski A/S3[ (hereafter Pumpinski), which decided to enter the so-called ‘bottom of the pyramid’ (BoP) market with a new technology in 2007.

The PAYGo water dispenser comes with smart cards and a cloud-connected water management system (WMS) (Figure 0.2). The dispenser can be installed at any water point. It features a simple and intuitive user interface and a card reader that uses radio-frequency-identification (RFID) to read the blue customer smart cards. A display above the card reader shows the balance on the card, the amount of water dispensed and the price per litre. The user places their prepaid smart card in the reader and presses a button on the interface to start the water flowing; the cost is automatically deducted from the card balance shown on the dispenser display.

The UK-based Rock Foundation was founded in 2005 by Jack Rock and his family, and in 2010, it had an endowment of £47 million. Jack Rock made his fortune in financial services and describes himself on the Foundation's website as an ‘entrepreneur’ and self-proclaimed ‘venture philanthropist’. Just as Harry, the director of water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) programmes at the Rock Foundation explained to me in the quote above, the Foundation states on its website that it wants to be a ‘pioneering, innovative and a disruptive influence’ through testing and advocating market-based solutions in the water and sanitation sector and bringing them to scale. The Rock Foundation seeks to establish market-based water supply systems that are maintained by small start-ups and provide their customers with water services. From its perspective, not enough attention has been paid to the financial viability of services and, to improve financial viability, service providers would need to make their service delivery much more effective.

Since the early 2010s, the Kenyan water sector has been subject to the creation of the ‘preconditions’ (Williams, 2021) for financialized forms of water provision, especially in urban areas. The Kenyan water sector reflects a ‘chronic investment gap’ (WASREB, 2018: 21) in infrastructural development and service delivery. In 2015, a major World Bank and Kenyan Water Services Regulatory Board (WASREB) report argued that KSh726 billion (US$7.1 billion) were needed to achieve the goal of universal water coverage by 2030 (WSP and WASREB, 2015). To close this gap, the Kenyan government and various international organizations have been progressively restructuring the water sector in an attempt to attract commercial and private sector financing (Williams, 2021). To ‘de-risk’ the financial capital available (mostly) in the Global North and ‘escort’ (Gabor, 2021) it into development projects such as those in Kenya, water utilities were advised to create reliable revenue streams by working towards reducing non-revenue water (NRW) by formalizing water connections and, thus, commodifying water. The subsequent revenue streams would then form the basis for investable financial products for domestic and international capital. For example, the Dutch water sector established and funded two organizations in Kenya – the Kenya Innovative Finance Facility for Water and the Kenya Pooled Water Fund – with the mission to provide early-stage capital – that is, to ‘blend’ revenue streams – in order to create viable investment opportunities for private financing (Savelli et al, 2018; Williams, 2021).

PAYGo water dispensers: different models and concepts

The Pumpinski Tie2Life department was set up in 2007 to develop PAYGo water dispensers and implement the first projects in Kenya. This was followed in 2013 by the Pumpinski Global Partnership Unit (GPU), created specifically to form partnerships with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and funders alike in order to set up projects. The two GPU staff, who both had a background in working with NGOs and development organizations, actively tried to engage major Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) NGOs, philanthropic foundations, bilateral development organizations, and organizations such as the World Bank to serve as implementers, as well as funders for water-related projects that include Pumpinski products. I want to briefly hint at Pumpinski's most important activities and partners surrounding the implementation of PAYGo water dispensers.

One of Pumpinski's major partners is the US NGO Planetary View (PV), one of the biggest NGOs in the WASH sector. The two organizations signed an agreement in 2014 to provide clean water to 2 million people in sub-Saharan Africa by 2020. As of October 2020, 2.4 million people had been reached (Pumpinski 2020). Since PV also installs Pumpinski submersible solar pumps, it is hard to know precisely how many people are served by PAYGo water dispensers. In Kenya, 80 PAYGo water dispensers were implemented by Pumpinski and PV in projects funded mainly by the Rock Foundation and USAID, reaching about 40,000 people in total.

The way Ellen, a Pumpinski Tie2Life Global Partnership Unit (GPU) staff member, describes the company's aims recalls discussions on market-based development which have been framed in the broadest sense under the labels of: bottom of the pyramid (BoP) markets (Prahalad, 2006), creative capitalism (Kiviat and Gates, 2008), ethical capitalism (Barry, 2010; Dolan and Rajak, 2016b), caring capitalism (Barman, 2016) or philanthrocapitalism (Bishop and Green, 2008). As well as the rise of market-based development, Blowfield and Dolan (see Blowfield, 2012; 2014) have observed that such market-based endeavours are often carried out by ‘business as development agent’. This concept refers to the fact that in the last decade, business has increasingly been positioning itself – and being regarded – as an actor that actively responds to social demands and pressures, and consciously addresses poverty and marginalization. This is in contrast to most of the postcolonial period, when the role of business was confined to that of a ‘development tool’ (Blowfield and Dolan, 2014: 22) which, through its central function of trade and commerce, would contribute to wealth creation, employment and the provision of goods and services.

The number of users, the amount of water consumed and the revenue generated all play an important role in the realization of commercialized water systems, cost recovery and the trend towards financialization through models of blended finance. As instances of blended finance in the Global South are still rare, the digitalization of water is seen as having the potential to change this, as digital tools, as well as potentially increasing operational efficiencies, can provide better tracking methods (Welsien and Lwakabare, 2020). De-risking is not only about blending finance and enforcing revenue collection. As its proponents argue, particularly regarding innovative financing involving banks and micro-finance institutions, digital technologies can create the transparent and auditable transactions that creditors will require. It is these quantitative, and presumably objective data – litres dispensed, revenue collected – that will provide the grounds for the realization of blended finance models.

As an additional angle on ‘the financialization of “nature”’ (Ouma et al, 2018), this chapter examines the practicalities of how water is measured in oder to be commodified and thereby questions the presumed objectivity of water-related data. In fact, it is not only users (Chapter 7) but also water itself that is not simply ‘represented’ by the water management system (WMS). Also, regarding water, the inscriptions produced enact certain realities and at the same time hide the multiplicity of the world. Since realities are enacted in practice, different practices may enact different realities (Law, 2004).

Organizations such as the World Bank and the GSMA speak of PAYGo water dispensers as the ‘future’ (Waldron, 2019; World Bank, 2020) of water supply in rural and peri-urban areas in the Global South. Against the backdrop of the MDGs, which have been accused of merely implementing hardware for the sake of promoting access to water but failing to address the ‘softer’ maintenance issues (Moriarty et al, 2013), PAYGo water dispensers have emerged as new tools to materially stabilize cost recovery and cater for (financial) sustainability. Due to their ability to offer remote monitoring and, presumably, efficient revenue collection, they found entry into the discussion about an ‘end of [community] ownership’ (Smits et al, 2016). At the same time, Pumpinski exemplifies the increasing positioning of ‘business as development actor’ (Blowfield and Dolan, 2014), a trend that found its latest peak in the declaration of the SDGs (Scheyvens et al, 2016).

In this book, I have shown how Pumpinski and PAYGo water dispensers shaped development models in the water sector in the Global South specifically, and what the concepts of business as a development actor and market-based development in more general terms mean in practice. Taking PAYGo water dispensers as a material vantage point allowed me to trace their heterogeneous network with few conceptual presumptions and to demystify, or rather defamiliarize and critically analyse, claims of the supposed superior sustainability of these development paradigms.