Fighting for universal access to clean water
More than 700 million people lack access to clean water, but research from the University of Notre Dame is helping organizations optimize how they manage, maintain, and build water pumps to reduce water scarcity.
Chengcheng Zhai remembers her first elementary school in rural Inner Mongolia in North China. The school had no running water, no indoor bathrooms. Outside, stone slab latrines stood waiting, even in the cold winter months. The students spent a portion of each school day collecting and boiling water.
During elementary school, Zhai’s family moved to Beijing. Her new school had faucets with hot and cold water, ready on demand. The change shocked her.
“That inequality in resource allocation is something that I really remembered from childhood. So when I decided to go to graduate school, I knew that that was the kind of question I wanted to address,” she said.
Zhai is now an assistant professor of information technology, analytics, and operations at the Mendoza College of Business. Her focus is in humanitarian operations, especially in development programs. For many years, that has meant looking at how to improve access to drinking water, especially in sub-Saharan Africa.
Worldwide, more than 770 million people lack access to clean drinking water. In Malawi, where part of Zhai’s research is based, the lush, leafy landscape could suggest water is hardly an issue. But clean water for drinking, cooking, and bathing certainly is. Locals rely on borehole hand pumps that are scattered throughout the area. On average, the pumps are spaced about one-third of a mile from each other, but they can be more than two miles apart. Zhai noted that statistics show that at any given time, across Africa, 25 percent of pumps—more than 100,000 of them—aren’t providing water, and if a pump breaks down, it can mean long walks to the next closest system to retrieve water.
Zhai explained that in Malawi, and around the globe, many people—often women and children—must walk more than 30 minutes to a water source, multiple times each day. Once there, they often lug five-gallon buckets, weighing around 40 pounds, back to their homes. Others are drinking from contaminated puddles or rivers, often resulting in disease, diarrhea, and even death.
- Locals here rely on borehole hand pumps which are scattered throughout the area. Some are closer to populated areas than others.
- On average, the pumps are distanced about 1/3 of a mile from each other, but they can be over 2.5 miles apart.
- Zhai notes that statistics show that 25 percent of pumps—more than 100,000 pumps—aren’t providing water at any given time.
- If a pump breaks down, it can mean long walks to the next closest system to retrieve water.
Data-driven strategies for sustainable water access
Zhai and her colleague Professor Alfonso Pedraza-Martinez, the director of Notre Dame’s Humanitarian Operations (HOPE) Lab, are not engineering new solutions. They aren’t outfitting pipes or digging wells. Instead, they are analytics experts who help nonprofit organizations optimize their resources. That means using datasets, optimizations, mathematical formulas, and computer modeling to help decide where to place new wells so they serve the most people. It also means reconsidering maintenance strategies on existing wells to keep them operational. In summary, Zhai said, they are helping nongovernmental organizations, charities, and businesses make better decisions. They also work closely with the communities to make sure there is buy-in from all stakeholders, so everyone feels responsible for the health of the well, now and in perpetuity.
“I've been working very closely with different nonprofit organizations to study how we can help them make better operational decisions, so that they can help people in rural Africa to have access to clean drinking water, but also to keep the water flowing, so that people do not lose access to clean drinking water,” she said.
And, Notre Dame students are learning to implement the same strategies.
Lesley Ekisowe is an MBA student focused on business analytics. Before arriving at Notre Dame, she worked in technology within the financial services sector. She enrolled at Notre Dame to sharpen her leadership skills, and because she was attracted to the tagline “Grow the Good in Business.” That same mentality led her to the Meyer Business on the Frontlines Program.
Business on the Frontlines aids humanitarian efforts
Started in 2008, this immersive, experiential learning program offers graduate students an opportunity to put into practice their coursework as they collaborate with humanitarian organizations, NGOs, religious organizations, and Fortune 500 companies. To date, teams have tackled more than 100 projects in 35 countries alongside groups such as Catholic Relief Services, Mercy Corps, Accenture, General Electric, and tribal governments. As of 2025, the program is led by Pedraza-Martinez, who is also the Greg and Patty Fox Collegiate Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations.
Pedraza-Martinez explained: “Students go to our partners every year to co-create solutions to partners’ problems. This is a semester-long class. The first part of the semester is mostly about problem solving. . . . They then spend two weeks with our partners and try to figure out if everything they have been doing during the weekly calls with those partners makes sense, to have recommendations moving forward to improve the situations they are studying.” He added that the students then have the remainder of the semester to take what they learned in-country and finalize their recommendations.
The partnerships are a win-win, Pedraza-Martinez said. “For our students, they get a life-changing experience by doing that, and for our partners, they get recommendations that are, in my opinion, consulting quality, because our students are very good students, and they are very well trained. The recommendations are implementable, and can change the status quo of the problem that [the students] are investigating together with the partners.“
This spring, 17 MBA students and one law student enrolled in the course and were divided into teams working with a women’s vocational school in Uganda, to improve capacity at primary and secondary schools in Honduras, and on water management in Malawi. Guided by alumni advisers, the groups did seven weeks of remote work with their assigned partners, two weeks on-site for interviews and fieldwork, and then seven weeks of recommendation development.
Ekisowe and five of her classmates accompanied Zhai to Malawi to assess water management. There, they spoke with everyone from mechanics and engineers who repair the pumps, to the lab technicians who test the water quality, to farmers and children who use the water. Ekisowe was moved by the trickle-down impact of how small changes could affect whole communities, and how it was important that those recommendations were influenced by data.
“It was very interesting for me to see how everyday analytics and everyday data informs how this kind of decisions are made for something as simple as building a borehole,” Ekisowe said.
Community partners help sustain water access
To turn that data into implementable change, Zhai emphasized that strong partnerships on the ground are critical. In Malawi, they work most closely with Fisherman’s Rest, a community development nonprofit that has worked closely with local villages across the country on water management, reforestation, and education projects.
Madzi Alipo, or “There is water,” is just one of the community projects Fisherman’s Rest oversees and invites visitors to help with in Malawi. Since 2017, the team there has overseen 1,784 pumps. As of June 2026, of those, 147 are out of commission, 305 have minor breaks, and 1,332 are fully operational. In partnership with Notre Dame, they are creating a new system of preventive maintenance that avoids unnecessary breakdowns and reduces the number of down days for each pump. To do so, Zhai and Pedraza-Martinez built a mathematical model that takes into consideration both the need for consistent access to water and the costs of labor, parts, and travel. In sum, they are looking for a nexus between usability and affordability that communities can actually sustain.
When water pumps fail, health, education, and the economy suffer
Those communities are motivated. Consider Maliya Primary School. Pilirane Kafukiza, a teacher there, noted that any disruption to water is also a disruption to education.
“We have a lot of challenges here when the water is not working,” Kafukiza said. “It is difficult for [students] to wash their hands before and after eating porridge. Even the women who cook porridge for [students], it is also difficult for them.”
She explained that when water is not close by, the school day is often delayed and shortened because the students and teachers must first fetch water for their families from farther access points before they can come to school. Or, in worst-case scenarios, they’ll use water from the local river, despite knowing the risks.
“It is very important to have clean water just because in clean water, we cannot suffer from different diseases,” she said. “If we have clean water, it means our health will also be good. We are not suffering from different diseases like diarrhea, cholera, and other diseases, just because we are using clean water.”
Health and safety is a major motivator, Zhai said, but so is gender equality. Because women and children are most often responsible for water, if water becomes more accessible, they have more time for school, for work, for community impact.
“On the surface, we are helping to solve a water crisis, but when you peel back the layers, we are helping address a struggle that undermines health, education, gender equality, and economic opportunity,” she said.
1784 total pumps under Fisherman's Rest management since 2017
1332 working pumps
305 pumps that need repairs
147 pumps inoperable
Building more efficient systems for clean water access
Zhai and Pedraza-Martinez did similar fieldwork in Ethiopia and the Central African Republic, which in total assessed 3,548 pumps. While there were similarities, each context resulted in slightly different maintenance strategies. Those suggestions, once implemented, led to a 42 percent to 62 percent reduction in pump downtime, greatly increasing water availability for thousands of people. Costs also went down in Malawi and Ethiopia with the new strategies, while the Central African Republic saw a slight rise, around 15 percent, but also more usability of existing pumps. The study also offered practical insight like travel routes and visit schedules for mechanics to accommodate the remote and challenging terrains, which will also mitigate costs associated with repeat visits.
Together, the outcomes are creating a malleable blueprint that can be used in other resource-limited settings, and by budget-conscious NGOs around the globe.
Returning from Malawi, Zhai is energized by the project. She says field research is a critical part of their work. Not only does it give them a clearer picture of the communities they are serving, the problems they face, and whether her models are working, but it also reminds them why they do it.
“It has meant to me a lot on a personal level as well, because this is exactly what I wanted to do going into grad school. I wanted to make the world a little better place using the knowledge and the skills I have, even it means just changing one person’s life,” Zhai said.
“My hope is that everyone will have access to clean water one day.”
Next year, students will return to Malawi, but this time to look at reforestation, at the request of their partners.
“Once you have boots on the ground, situations change,” Pedraza-Martinez said. “We’re flexible enough to take a different direction, but with the same structure.”
As Zhai and Pedraza-Martinez continue to study humanitarian operations challenges, they’ve invited academic researchers from around the globe to join them. The HOPE Lab now hosts an annual research workshop with collaborative sessions.
The What Would You Fight For? campaign is supported in part by a generous gift from David and Debra Delahanty.