Most water services in rural, low-income communities are provided with one-off infrastructure installations funded by national and international donors. Low-income communities do not have the financial resources to pay the full cost of water services (while high-income countries largely subsidize water for their citizens). As a result, roughly half of the water systems in these communities fail within a few years. 

Disrupting this status quo, Virridy’s team developed sensor and analytical technologies designed to continuously monitor water services. Virridy also developed the first-ever methodologies and projects to earn carbon credits from drinking water treatment, reaching millions of people in Kenya and Rwanda with water treatment technologies and operations services, paid for with climate finance. Now, supported by USAID, NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the World Bank, and with venture backing and project finance, Virridy is combining these technologies and methodologies to create the first global portfolio of nature-based carbon credit financing for drinking water protection for millions of people. 

The water filtration technologies reduce both the use and demand for firewood to boil water, and will generate carbon credits as revenue to provide on-going water services. The treatment systems include Virridy’s sensor technologies and analytics that allow for remote support for operation and maintenance, and provide the digital auditing trail for the carbon credits. 

Virridy is already supporting the water supplies of over four million people in East Africa. The company is, working with key stakeholders, including USAID, NASA, the World Bank, UNICEF, the Millennium Water Alliance, and the Kenya National Drought Management Authority to predict and forecast water demand and respond with expanded water system operations and repairs. 

Previous programs run by Virridy’s founders reached millions of people with water treatment services in Kenya and Rwanda, using private financing and unlocking over $100 million of carbon credit revenue to provide on-going water treatment for communities and households. An independent experimental and randomized controlled trial by Emory University and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine was published in 2019 and showed that among children under five years of age, the program reduced diarrhea by 29% and acute respiratory infection by 25%, saving hundreds of lives. 

Over the next few years, Virridy will reach an additional two million children in Rwanda with institutional-based water treatment systems across over 1,000 schools. 

Virridy’s team is now on-shoring these concepts, developing methodologies in the United States to tie continuous monitoring of the water quality in watersheds to the reduced carbon footprint of water treatment, thereby generating carbon credit revenue incentives to protect drinking water sources. 

Globally, water insecurity is a significant and growing risk in the broader global security landscape, and it is increasing and is not limited to high or low-income regions. While these challenges are ultimately local or regional in scope, the implications of growing water insecurity can have global ramifications, including spillover to military and non-military violence. As an economic good, water is hard to manage and transact. It moves on its own, has both renewable and non-renewable sources and uses, and is too heavy to be easily transported across boundaries as a commodity. However, climate finance provides a liquid market to steer capital from high-income, high-polluting industries toward activities that can conserve and better value water, and to low income, vulnerable communities in need of increased reliable, safe access to water.