Should Your Nonprofit Charge Its Beneficiaries?

In early 2014, while on a business trip to Ghana, the entrepreneur Sunil Lalvani saw two children drinking from a puddle on the side of the road. While talking to the locals, Lalvani learned that a nongovernmental organization (NGO) had installed a hand pump at a well in the nearby village, but it had soon broken, and no one had ever come to fix it. In fact, many other well-meaning NGOs had installed many other pumps in many other villages to provide access to safe water in the region, but upkeep of the pumps had been left to the communities, which often lacked the resources and skills to maintain them. As a result, roughly one-fourth of the pumps in the region were inoperative within 12 months of installation.