Business Model Elements for Sustainable Water Treatment Systems in Resource-Constrained Areas

Sammanfattning

While Sub-Saharan Africa has seen ongoing infrastructure expansion, a persistent functionality gap leaves roughly one-third of rural water systems non-functional or strongly underperforming at any given time. CommunityBased Management has proven fragile in practice. While the Service Delivery Approach is an advancement, it operates more as a diagnostic framework rather than a design blueprint. Business model theory has not yet been thoroughly applied to essential services in resource-constrained areas, leaving a gap in how sustainable operations should be organized. This thesis addresses the question: What elements need to be considered for a business model of an off-grid water treatment system to be sustainable in a resource-constrained area? An inductive, single-case study of a Swedish startup’s pre-commercial Off-Grid Water Treatment System is conducted, drawing on stakeholder interviews and document analysis in Kenya and Zambia. Sustainability is defined as reliable drinking water delivery over ten years without any breakdown exceeding 48 hours. Three interdependent themes emerge from the findings. First, trust, local ownership, and accountability are prerequisites for governance. Support from traditional leadership and community participation in planning proved more important than formal contracts. Second, pay-per-use tariffs alone are insufficient given seasonal agricultural incomes. Cross-subsidization through productive enterprises that use water commercially emerged as a more viable financial architecture. Third, technical failure is primarily a people and incentives problem. The brain drain of newly trained operators leaving for opening urban employment opportunities and a lack of maintenance culture are predictable structural patterns that must be accounted for in business model design. By combining these governance, financial and technical dimensions, the study proposes business model elements for organizing essential services in resource constrained-areas, where standard market assumptions cannot be assumed.