Kerstin Danert

Kerstin Danert did not come to water through a boardroom. She trained as a mechanical engineer at the University of Strathclyde, did a master's and then a PhD at Cranfield University, and ran that doctoral research not in a lab but in Uganda, where she ended up living and working for ten years. She stayed on as an Engineering Advisor to the country's Ministry of Water and Environment, and only moved to Switzerland in 2008. That decade in the field is the thing to understand about her, because almost everything she says about rural water comes from having watched it succeed and fail up close, in the places where the water actually has to come out of the ground.

Kerstin Danert is best known for her work with the Rural Water Supply Network, the global network (hosted by the Swiss Skat Foundation) that connects the engineers, governments and NGOs trying to get reliable water to rural communities. She directed its secretariat from 2009 to 2017 and, for 18 years in total, led its theme on Sustainable Groundwater Development, coordinating flagship work like "Cost-Effective Boreholes" with partners such as UNICEF, the World Bank and WaterAid. Today she runs that expertise through Ask for Water, her own one-woman consultancy doing facilitation, research and training on water supplies in low and middle-income countries. (On the podcast the name came through as "Asperwater", which is just how "Ask for Water" sounds at speed.)

Kerstin Danert's central argument is deceptively simple, and it is the reason her episode is worth your time. A borehole, she says, is not a solution. It is "a point in a box", one visible event in a chain of things that happen before and after it. To judge whether a water point will work, she uses three tests: the fit, the quality, and the longevity. The fit is whether the source actually suits the local context, the governance, the users. The quality is whether the planning, the drilling and the infrastructure were done properly. The longevity is whether anyone is monitoring the resource, stocking spare parts and managing it once the cameras leave. Drill without those, and in her words you are just "drilling a borehole on the moon".

Kerstin Danert is also one of the more pointed voices on the show about who pays for rural water. She is sceptical of the fashionable idea that water can simply finance itself. "Water doesn't just finance itself," she says, noting that most water utilities, even in Europe, are subsidised. Her worry is that framing water purely as a business opportunity quietly leaves out the people who cannot be customers: the very poor, the elderly, those with disabilities. Access to safe water, she reminds the listener, "is a human right and a legal obligation", and she openly questions whether a business-only lens can ever deliver that for everyone. It is not the comfortable thing to say in a room full of investors, which is exactly why it is useful to hear.

Kerstin Danert recorded this episode a hundred days after MrBeast's "100 wells" campaign put rural African water on YouTube's front page, and her take on it is the whole of her philosophy in miniature. He clearly had an impact, she allows, but "just a bit like when you drill that borehole, it's too early to know whether it's going to last". For Kerstin Danert, longevity is the only test that ever really counts, and on the wells, as on most things in this sector, "the jury's still out". Coming from someone who has spent a quarter of a century watching which water points survive and which quietly fail, that patience is not cynicism. It is the most experienced thing anyone said about the whole episode.

“The provision of domestic water and drinking water is much more than drilling that borehole. There's a whole set of things that happen before that and a whole set of things that happen after that. So it's like a point in a box.”