How to finance real water justice around the globe? Jo Trevor on four insights from a thought-provoking workshop at the recent Marmalade Festival in Oxford.
For decades, the global conversation about water access has been devoid of humanity: a technical, top-down, capital-heavy discussion occurring in silos that not only excludes those on the frontline of the climate crisis living with water scarcity but also continues to allow the powerful to extract at their expense.
The huge challenge the world faces in delivering and, crucially, financing real water justice was the focus of a recent workshop at the Marmalade Festival in Oxford during the Skoll World Forum. We gathered academics, NGO workers and community representatives under the banner of “Water Security: Mind The Gap”.
Participants were given complete autonomy over setting the agenda. Here, we share four key insights from what emerged.
1. The idea of a universal fix is a myth: we need local ownership of local solutions
The workshop in April reminded us what local actors have long known: there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Local ownership, not just local delivery, is what makes water systems stick.
That means communities exercising shared power and organising collectively, not just participating. Today, they are leading the way by designing tariff systems, managing infrastructure, repairing hydrological cycles in their ecosystems, and, when ignored, escalating to demand structural change.
We also need to always remember that water is a human right; it cannot be owned by anyone and should never be used as a weapon. The message from communities on the frontline of the water crisis is clear: Authenticity matters. Local leadership isn’t a checkbox: it’s the foundation for sustainable transformation.
2. We need new thinking on financing: blending public, private and philanthropy
The financing gap looms large, but the solution isn’t just more money. It’s spending money in more effective ways.
We need to stop ignoring the unique context for financing every water project. For instance, in humanitarian crises or fragile contexts, traditional models of financing focus on just funding the system itself and too often ignore the challenges of the context. Such an approach is destined to fail.
We also need to think hard about the roles of the market, public sector and philanthropy. What was clear from our discussions was that it isn’t about one finance mechanism: it’s about bringing together blended finance – public, private and philanthropic – to unlock the resources needed while at the same time safeguarding local autonomy. We need water security to be higher on the political agenda and we need finance that goes beyond what look like the safest options.
Throughout, we need to remember that financing water isn’t an altruistic endeavour: it is protection of our most important resource that benefits us all.
Participants set out how getting people to pay for water is going to be a prominent way to finance water infrastructure and its maintenance in some contexts. But, of course, ensuring that it remains affordable for everyone is going to be key to the success of introducing billing systems. New innovations to help communities pay for water and water systems are going to be crucial. They can get finance through new finance options such as household loan schemes and receive subsidies as part of the solution, though any new finance options will need to be accountable to local communities and transparent.
New finance will go hand in hand with good governance. That means managing water systems, in a way that is participatory and involves the community: in fact, such governance will be essential to keeping the taps on.
3. The failure to maintain systems is not just about engineering
Too often, water maintenance is an afterthought until taps run dry. But in the workshop, maintenance took centre stage.
What’s clear is we need a much deeper understanding of why so many systems collapse. Some of the reason suggested showed straight away that such failures are rooted something much bigger than engineering problems. Is it poor professional support? Is it unmanageable demands on communities, or unrealistic user fee models? Participants also looked at what works: from Cape Town’s proactive planning to Zambia’s scale-up success to rural Ghana’s hybrid models.
We also dug into the sticky politics behind the maintenance of systems. Why do flashy piped systems get more attention than the community-based alternatives? Why do funding models still ignore longer-term maintenance? Why is water maintenance so invisible in policy debates until it becomes a crisis?
As one attendee put it: “Don’t just de-risk the market. De-risk for the community too,” meaning that while we must make investment opportunities attractive to financiers, we must also make water systems safe, affordable, and manageable for the communities who will use them. This may include training programmes to ensure the skills needed for maintenance are distributed within the community.
4. We need narratives that uplift, not exclude, communities
Water security isn’t just a technical issue. It’s a story we tell, or too often fail to tell.
Participants reflected on the language of water, how narratives shape public opinion, how grassroots storytelling builds accountability. How politicians use water for votes – or avoid it when the numbers look bad. Words such as “resilience” and “equity” must be backed by governance, finance, and action.
We need to tell the right stories, to the right people, in the right way. Because the wrong story can do harm. When we talk about water, we must challenge narratives that frame communities as helpless: that can justify exclusion. And it can also, quite literally, drain the resources from where they’re most needed.
Where Do We Go From Here?
The message from the room was clear: water security is not a technical puzzle to be solved in isolation. It’s a collective, political and economic challenge that demands collective thinking and inclusive governance.
It’s about shifting from service delivery to shared responsibility; from global blueprints to locally-led solutions; from investor returns to community resilience.
If we’re serious about bridging the water security gap, we must put local actors not at the edge of the conversation, but at its centre. And we must act, not when the next drought hits, but now.
It’s easy for those in the relatively water-secure bubble in the Global North to forget that for billions around the world turning on a tap is a privilege, not an automatic right. Water security isn’t just a technical problem: it’s a question of justice, voice, politics – and power.
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