Africa's Institutions Don't Have a Funding Problem

In 2019, I stood inside the operations room of a water utility serving roughly 200,000 people in a mid-sized Kenyan city. The walls were covered in hand-drawn maps — laminated printouts annotated with years of corrections in different colours of pen, each layer representing a new technician's attempt to reconcile what was on paper with what actually existed underground. A whiteboard held the day's fault reports, written in a format that hadn't changed in fifteen years. The billing office next door had three computers, two of which worked, running software so old that the vendor had ceased operations before I finished primary school.

This utility was not poorly managed. The people running it were experienced, dedicated, and deeply knowledgeable about their network. They had survived budget cuts, political interference, and the particular chaos of Kenya's devolution process. They had kept water flowing to most of their customers most of the time, which is harder than it sounds.

What they did not have was tools.

Not a single field technician had a smartphone app to log a fault. Meter readers recorded readings on paper forms that took two weeks to reach the billing office. Customer complaints came in by phone and were written into a notebook. The utility had no real-time view of how much water it was producing versus how much it was billing for. It was operating, effectively, blind.

I had come to study this utility as part of research I was conducting on water service providers across Kenya. What I found over the following months, as I visited utility after utility, was not an anomaly. It was the norm.

The Argument Everyone Gets Wrong

When people talk about why Africa's public services underperform — why water utilities lose 40-60% of their distributed water,¹ why constituency offices fail to track the cases they're handling, why community health workers' data never makes it to the Ministry of Health — they reach for familiar explanations. Corruption. Underfunding. Weak institutions. Colonial legacies.

These are real. I am not dismissing them.

But they are not the whole story. And they are, in an important sense, not the most actionable part of the story.

Here is what I have come to believe, after building software for African water utilities since 2019, after studying 45 utilities across Kenya, after sitting in constituency offices and watching MPs try to manage thousands of constituent cases through WhatsApp: Africa's public institutions are not failing primarily because they are corrupt or underfunded. They are failing because they are operating without the tools to do their jobs.

This is a different diagnosis. And it points toward a different treatment.

The water utility in that Kenyan city wasn't losing half its water because its staff were stealing it — most of those losses were commercial: unmetered connections, billing errors, meter reading gaps that compounded over months. Problems that software solves. The constituency office drowning in a WhatsApp backlog wasn't staffed by incompetent people — it was staffed by capable people with no case management system, no constituent database, no way to track whether a problem had been resolved. Problems that software solves.

The tools that would fix these problems are not exotic. They are not experimental. They exist today, running inside municipal systems in Amsterdam and Singapore and São Paulo. They have been refined over decades. They work.

What does not exist — what has not existed, until very recently — is a version of those tools built for here.

The Translation Problem

Built for M-Pesa, not Stripe. Built for GPRS connectivity in a rural ward, not fibre in a data centre. Built for a utility manager who came up through the field and learned software on a feature phone, not a product manager in San Francisco with a computer science degree. Built for the specific, messy, human reality of a Kenyan constituency office in 2025, not an idealised workflow diagram drawn up in a development finance institution's headquarters.

This is what I mean by translation.

The mistake that well-resourced organisations — development banks, international NGOs, even some local tech companies — make is to assume that the existence of a global software solution means the problem is solved. It is not. A water utility management system built for a European context will fail in Nakuru not because Nakuru's utility staff are less capable, but because the assumptions baked into that software — about connectivity, about user literacy, about payment infrastructure, about the specific data standards used, about which workflows are automated and which require human judgment — are wrong for Nakuru.

Wrong assumptions produce software that doesn't get used. Software that doesn't get used produces utilities that keep operating on whiteboards and laminated maps.

I have watched this happen. An international NGO partners with a global software company to deploy a management system for a network of rural water utilities. The software is technically excellent. The NGO funds a training programme. The system goes live. Two years later, during a follow-up visit, the system is running on one computer in the corner of the office. The rest of the staff have gone back to their spreadsheets — not because they are resistant to technology, but because the software assumed workflows that don't match how their organisation actually operates, because it requires an internet connection they can't always guarantee, because the support documentation is in English and the interface doesn't accommodate the local fee structures they use.

The problem was not the technology. The problem was that nobody did the translation work.

What I Have Seen When the Translation Gets Done Right

In 2019, I founded Flux Water — a platform built from the ground up for Kenyan water utilities. Everything was designed around the specific operational reality of how these utilities actually work: how field technicians move, what connectivity they can rely on, how customers pay (primarily M-Pesa), what data the utility actually has versus what it theoretically should have.

By 2023, four major Nairobi utilities were running on the platform. Field operation costs dropped by 90%. We had built what became Kenya's largest water utility dataset — 30 million data points — which earned recognition from the United Nations during the Global Handwashing Day response to the COVID-19 pandemic.² Not because we invented anything new, but because we translated something that already existed into something that actually worked here.

Not because we invented anything new. Because we translated something that already existed into something that actually worked here.

Then, in 2024, I started watching a different kind of institution struggle with the same problem.

Kenya's 290 constituency offices — the front line of devolved government, the places where ordinary Kenyans go when they need help — were drowning. MPs were managing constituent cases through personal WhatsApp numbers. Caseworkers were keeping records in exercise books. CDF allocations were being tracked in Excel spreadsheets shared over WhatsApp groups. Bursary applications were arriving on paper, being evaluated by gut feel, and being lost in filing cabinets.

Again: not because the people running these offices were incompetent. Because nobody had built them tools.

BungeConnect — the operating system for Kenya's parliamentary offices — launched in 2024. Constituency case management, constituent databases, CDF tracking, SMS broadcasting. The same thesis, a different institution.

Two products. The same insight underneath both of them.

The Larger Pattern

The more I have studied this, the more I have come to see it as a pattern that extends across every sector delivering basic services in Africa.

Water utilities running on paper. Constituency offices running on WhatsApp. Community health workers reporting on paper forms. Rural financial cooperatives — SACCOs, chamas, village savings groups — managing billions of shillings of community capital in exercise books and mobile money logs that nobody can analyse in aggregate. Small energy utilities operating mini-grids without the operational data to price their services correctly or predict demand.

In every case, the problem is not the absence of technology in the world. It is the absence of technology that has been properly translated for these specific institutions, in these specific contexts, with the specific constraints and capabilities they actually have.

This is the gap that FluxImpact exists to close.

What We Are Doing About It

FluxImpact is a research and technology lab. The research part is not incidental — it is the foundation. We do not build software for an institution before we understand, in granular detail, how that institution actually operates: what its workflows are, what data it has and doesn't have, what its staff can and cannot do, what its users expect, what its connectivity looks like, how it handles money, who makes decisions and how.

This research produces something useful in its own right: evidence. Data about how Kenya's public institutions are actually performing, where the operational gaps are, what interventions have worked and what hasn't. We publish this research — as essays, white papers, policy memos — because the evidence is a public good even before a single line of software is written.

Then we build. Software and hardware, bespoke to the institution, translated for the context. Sometimes this becomes a FluxImpact product — a platform that can be deployed across many similar institutions. Sometimes it is commissioned work for a specific partner. Always it is built to be owned and operated by the institution itself, not dependent on our continued involvement to function.

Then we measure. We track outcomes against baselines established in the research phase. We publish what we find, including what didn't work, because the field learns faster when failures are documented as carefully as successes.

Why This Matters Beyond Efficiency

I want to be careful here, because it is easy to make this argument sound like a technocratic pitch — as if better software is simply more efficient, and efficiency is the point.

It is not just about efficiency.

In Nairobi's informal settlements, residents of areas without utility connections pay water vendors 10 to 15 times more per litre than residents of formal areas with direct utility connections. Part of why utilities haven't extended their networks into these areas is that they don't have the operational capacity to manage a larger network — they can't track what they'd be deploying, bill for it, maintain it, or respond when something goes wrong. The software problem produces an equity problem. Fixing the software problem is an equity intervention.

In Kenya's constituencies, CDF allocations — public money intended for public goods — are distributed with almost no public accountability. Nobody publishes data on who got bursaries, or how public works projects were selected, or whether the money reached its intended beneficiaries. The software problem produces a democracy problem.

In Kenya's financial system, millions of people who are highly financially active — who save in chamas, borrow from SACCOs, pay utility bills via M-Pesa — are invisible to the formal financial system because their financial activity runs through informal rails that generate no structured data. The software problem produces an inclusion problem.

In each case, better institutional software is not just an operational improvement. It is a precondition for the kind of accountability, equity, and inclusion that African societies are owed.

What I Am Not Saying

I am not saying technology solves everything. It does not.

Corruption is real and software does not cure it — though software that creates data transparency makes some forms of corruption significantly harder to conceal.

Underfunding is real. A utility that cannot pay its staff or maintain its infrastructure will not be saved by a management platform.

Political interference is real. A constituency office where the MP uses CDF as a personal patronage tool will not be transformed by case management software.

I am saying something more limited and, I think, more honest: that across Africa's public institutions, there is a layer of operational failure that is attributable to the absence of appropriate tools, and that this layer of failure is large, documentable, and fixable. That fixing it will not solve everything, but it will make a significant and measurable difference to the lives of the people these institutions are supposed to serve.

And that somebody has to do the translation work.

The Next Billion

Kenya's population will double in the next thirty years. Africa's population will reach roughly 2.5 billion by 2050.³ The institutions that are supposed to deliver water, healthcare, democratic representation, and financial services to this growing population are, right now, running on exercise books and laminated maps.

This is not inevitable. The technology that could equip these institutions exists. The evidence of what works — and what doesn't — can be built up and published, so that the whole field learns faster. The translation work, though hard and specific and slow, can be done.

That is what FluxImpact is for.

The technology exists. Africa's institutions deserve to have it.

Ken Ruto is the Principal Lead of FluxImpact, a research and technology lab based in Nairobi, Kenya. He is the founder of AccessWASH and BungeConnect. He can be reached at kkimtai@gmail.com or at kenruto.fluximpact.org.