What rural America can learn from Nairobi's water utilities

When I moved from optimizing water utilities in Nairobi to studying lagoon systems in rural West Virginia, I expected two different worlds. What I found was the same problem wearing different clothes: small operators, thin budgets, and infrastructure no one had fully counted.

The breakthrough in Nairobi wasn't a new treatment technology — it was data-driven operations. Rural U.S. systems face the same gap.