The challenge of rural water and sanitation
In Latin America, more than 145,000 community organizations currently supply water to roughly 80 million people, often stepping in where the state has not reached. While around 53.7% of the rural population has access to safely managed drinking water, safely managed sanitation remains largely out of reach, and services are commonly precarious. These community operators typically face outdated infrastructure, limited technical and managerial capacity, and little access to financing, challenges made worse by climate change and water scarcity.
What is this handbook about?
This handbook presents a practical methodology for designing and implementing open innovation processes among community organizations that manage rural water and sanitation services, local authorities, and innovation ecosystem actors such as universities, incubators, and entrepreneurs. Open innovation, in this context, is understood as a collaborative approach that brings together capacities, knowledge, and resources across actors to generate solutions to local service challenges, while fostering shared learning. It was developed by cewas and Young Water Solutions (YWS) as technical partners in a technical cooperation between the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and Colombia's Ministry of Housing, City and Territory (MVCT).
Origin: the Antioquia pilot experience
The methodology grew out of a technical cooperation project carried out in the department of Antioquia, Colombia, between January 2024 and May 2025, together with two community organizations: AsoCamilo, which serves around 3,000 users in Amagá, and AMBA, which serves around 1,700 users in Ciudad Bolívar. The project began with an in-depth diagnostic of each organization's innovation management practices, which revealed clear gaps and confirmed the need for a different, more collaborative approach, one built specifically for community operators rather than adapted from urban utilities. Throughout the handbook, this experience is shown in boxed examples that illustrate how each phase worked in practice.
Six phases to innovate
The model proposes a six-phase process: (1) identifying and prioritizing problems and defining the challenge to be solved; (2) capturing ideas through an open innovation event with local innovators; (3) developing and testing a minimum viable product (MVP) in the field, together with the community organization; (4) implementing the solution, training users, and handing it over to the community; (5) developing the business model, strengthening capacities, and defining a market-entry strategy; and (6) deploying and scaling the solution by formalizing alliances and promoting it among other community organizations. Each phase includes concrete activities, key concepts, tools, and supporting templates.
Who it's for
It is designed for representatives of national sector authorities, community-based service providers, regional and local authorities, universities, research centers, incubators, and accelerators in contact with innovators across the water and sanitation sector in Latin America, particularly Colombia. It can be used as a complete, sequential guide, or as a modular tool to support a specific activity, such as running a single co-creation event or developing an MVP.
Closing: lessons and recommendations
The handbook closes with lessons learned from the Colombia process, along with practical recommendations for replicating the methodology in other rural territories and adapting it to different institutional and community contexts.
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