Max Foundation

21/08/2026

Wells get drilled, taps get installed, and a few years later a small part fails and the whole thing goes quiet. Almost all development financing is designed to build the asset. Very little is designed to keep it running.

In Sidama, Ethiopia, Max Foundation has been working with WaterLife Construction, powered by P4G, on the other half of that problem: 25 abandoned schemes repaired rather than replaced — one of them out of service for fifteen years — and a company paid to maintain them. Water that used to take two hours to fetch now takes under thirty minutes.

The most useful finding is not the repairs. Households in Aleta Chuko put 200 to 240 birr (around €1.50 to €1.80) a year into a shared account for spare parts, and several said they would pay more, as long as the pump keeps working. They are not buying water. They are buying the confidence that it will still be there next month.

Our role was not repair work at all, it was helping a small Ethiopian company become a business a bank could take seriously. That investment has not landed yet, and the eight months of accounts show exactly which problem to fix first.

This is an early finding from a learning piece we published recently, with further testing ahead. Small pilots earn their cost when they surface a signal like this, while there is still time to redesign around it rather than scale past it.

So: how do we shift more investment from building assets to keeping services running?

Read more:

Can clean water pay for itself? In Sidama, Ethiopia, we tried to find out. Fixing a well is the easy part... keeping it running is the real test. Read more about the partnership piloting the answer.

11/08/2026

In coastal Bangladesh, ponds run dry and tube wells stop producing water for months at a time. Families are left collecting water from canals and wetlands — water that makes children sick with diarrhoea, pneumonia and allergies.

Max TapWater is changing that by building locally operated piped water networks, in partnership with local government and communities in Barishal division. Areas are identified together with union-level authorities, water is tested at the Public Health Laboratory in Barishal before it reaches anyone's home, and a trained local operator manages and maintains each network.

"Now I have water in my home, I no longer need to fetch water," says Niru, a customer in Patuakhali. "We used to suffer from allergies and waterborne diseases, but not anymore," adds Mukta.

Since 2022, Max TapWater has built 100+ water grids, connected 21,000 people to safe water, and delivered more than 1 billion litres across Bangladesh.

It's a model built on local ownership, local government partnership and sustainable market systems, one Max Foundation is proud to support.

🎥 Watch the full video to see how it works, from grid to tap: https://youtu.be/KyDJXQhYZSE

🔗 Learn more about Max TapWater: https://maxtapwater.com/

What does it mean when a family finally has safe water at the tap?...

30/07/2026

Most child health programmes get strong results in a pilot... and then they stall. Short-term funding ends, parallel delivery systems disappear, and the impact disappears with them.

We believe in building for scale from day one, through a structured pathway: pilot, design for scale, test at scale, transition to scale. At every stage, two tracks run in parallel: strengthening the systems that will carry a solution forward, and building the evidence that proves it's ready to.

What that means in practice:
→ Solutions integrate into government planning and budgets, not run alongside them
→ They align across sectors — health, agriculture, water — rather than sitting in one silo
→ They mobilise private-sector supply chains, so access doesn't depend on continued donor funding
→ Every stage feeds a learning agenda, so what works gets carried forward and what doesn't gets adapted early, before it reaches national level

The result is systems designed to outlast any single donor cycle. In Ethiopia, this pathway underpins our work with the Government of Ethiopia through the Seqota Declaration. In Bangladesh, it's what took stunting rates from 51% to 25% over five years — a result now validated by the Karolinska Institutet.

Scale isn't what happens after a successful pilot. It's what you design for from the start.

Read more about our Evidence for Scale approach: https://maxfoundation.org/white_paper/scaling-solutions/

How we turn proven innovations into sustainable national systems by working with governments, communities, and markets.

20/07/2026

Where there was no market for menstrual hygiene products, Lata Debi built one.

She is one of over 60 Health Promotion Agents in Bangladesh's Healthy Village Urban programme, in which local entrepreneurs are trained to supply essential health products through their own small businesses. The programme strengthens the market system around them: product supply chains, business training, and community trust in products that were once hard to access or talk about.

Lata now earns a monthly profit of 15,000 to 18,000 taka (€105 to €126), and her peers elected her district president of their association. As one young customer put it: "Earlier, I was shy to buy sanitary pads. Now I buy comfortably from Lata Aunty."

Health products reaching families through a market that works, and a business that pays its owner. That is how impact lasts.

📖 Read Lata's story in our Impact Report 2025: https://maxfoundation.org/impact-report-2025/

Impact Report 2025: Scaling What Lasts. Read more on how our child-health work is taking root in government systems in Ethiopia, Bangladesh and Nepal.

13/07/2026

Every year, development programmes invest millions in child health. And every year, many of those gains disappear when the funding ends.

The Healthy Village Programme in Ethiopia was built to do the opposite: not to deliver services, but to make Ethiopia's own systems better at delivering them. In every village where it worked, it tested one question: can this run inside government, without donor funding?

Over five years, across woredas (districts) in Amhara and Tigray Max Foundation worked alongside the Government of Ethiopia, Plan International, iDE, and ORDA Ethiopia, with funding from the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, testing integrated water, nutrition and maternal health approaches village by village.

What survived that test is now being carried into national policy. The government's Malnutrition-Free Village model has been brought together with the Healthy Village approach and has now become the Malnutrition-Free Healthy Village model. It’s national guidelines will be published as the unit of scale for the Seqota Declaration, Ethiopia's commitment to end child stunting, with the ambition of reaching 125 million people across all 1,050 of the country's woredas by 2030.

Read the full story on how a five-year programme end up shaping a country's national health policy: https://bit.ly/Healthy-Village

07/07/2026

Where there was no market for menstrual hygiene products, Lata Debi built one.

She is one of 63 Health Promotion Agents in Bangladesh's Healthy Village Urban programme, most of whom started with no business experience. Lata now earns a monthly profit of 15,000 to 18,000 taka (€105 to €126), and her peers elected her district president of their association. As one young customer put it: “Earlier, I was shy to buy sanitary pads. Now I buy comfortably from Lata Aunty.”

Health products reaching families through a business that pays its owner. That is how impact lasts.

📖 Read Lata's story in our Impact Report 2025: https://maxfoundation.org/impact-report-2025/

Impact Report 2025: Scaling What Lasts. Read more on how our child-health work is taking root in government systems in Ethiopia, Bangladesh and Nepal.

30/06/2026

Our Impact Report 2025 is here! This year's theme is Scaling What Lasts.

In one of the hardest years our sector has faced, with deep cuts to development budgets across Europe, this was the year our work took real steps towards lasting scale. In Ethiopia, our Healthy Village approach and the government's own model have merged into the Malnutrition-Free Healthy Village, now the central model in the national strategy to end child stunting by 2030, with the ambition to reach 125 million people. An approach that began in a handful of villages will now be rolled out nationwide.

Alongside this, in Bangladesh the government has adopted two nutrition data and budgeting tools we developed with partners, and Max TapWater grew to 98 water grids reaching over 22,000 people. In Nepal, we launched Healthy Village with local government leading from day one.

📖 Read more: https://maxfoundation.org/impact-report-2025/

Impact Report 2025: Scaling What Lasts. Read more on how our child-health work is taking root in government systems in Ethiopia, Bangladesh and Nepal.

19/06/2026

How do you make sure every young child gets the nutrition they need? First you have to know two things: who those children are, and what reaching them actually costs.

That's what our Child Profile Estimation and Costing Model does. It maps how many children under five live in an area, how many are malnourished, and which services they're missing. Then it puts a real price tag on closing those gaps. A moral case becomes a budget line a local council can plan for and a ministry can fund.

The result? In Bangladesh, the National Nutrition Council has endorsed the model, and it's now being written into the country's next national nutrition plan.

Read more:

If a government wants to keep its youngest children well-nourished, it first needs to know two things: who those children are, and what reaching them actually costs.

11/06/2026

Around 40% of children under five in Ethiopia are stunted (being too short for one's age), which is a challenge shaped by nutrition, health, Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) and food security, and one no single sector can solve alone.

For the past years, the Healthy Village programme has worked alongside the Seqota Declaration — the Government of Ethiopia's national commitment to end child stunting — implementing integrated approaches in Amhara and Tigray regions. Out of that partnership came the Malnutrition-Free Healthy Village Model: a practical, government-owned model for preventing stunting at village level.

As the Seqota Declaration enters its scaling phase in 2026, that is the model the government will take forward, with the evidence, training and ownership in place to carry the work far beyond the programme itself.

This video tells that story: https://youtu.be/7qTbOlfMGfM

07/06/2026

Roughly 600 million people fall ill from unsafe food each year. Nearly all of it is preventable.

This World Food Safety Day, the world is moving "from burden to solutions." Here's one of ours: the entrepreneurs pictured sell safe, nutritious food in their own communities — proof that strong local markets are a health intervention, not just an economic one.

We combine evidence, market systems and an integrated approach to WASH and nutrition, so safe food reaches the families who need it most.

Read more on our approach to food and nutrition security → https://maxfoundation.org/our-focus/food-and-nutrition/