Riva Africa

Afou Bengaly understands deeply that essential services improve when citizens have the power to demand them. Before she joined Riva, she spent years helping young people and civil society organisations across Africa build that power – to gather evidence, develop their voice and hold governments to account. She brought that conviction with her into the water sector, and it has shaped everything since.

Africa’s water and public services crisis, Juste argues, is not a financing problem. It is an institutional one. Donors can build infrastructure and pay for programmes; what they cannot build is the credibility of the state that has to run them. That gap – between money spent and systems that actually work – is what he has spent twenty years closing.

In the global effort to provide sustainable and universal water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) services, one truth is clear: infrastructure alone is not enough. Functioning and resilient services are delivered by systems that are made up of capable people, responsive institutions, and effective collaboration between all actors involved.