August 27, 2026
The Air Pump Problem: Why Recurring Revenue Is The Money That Works In Year Seven
When donors travel to the field with us in East Africa, they often want to bring along soccer balls, and we love this. The kids love it even more. But we have one rule: No ball without an air pump.
A soccer ball in a rural Kenya community gets played nearly to death—it gets kicked on dirt, on rock, through acacia thorns and for hours a day. Without a pump, the balls are flat within a week. With a pump, the same balls are still in play years later—scuffed and patched but still alive. The ball is the gift everyone uses for a photo op, but the pump is the reason the gift keeps giving.
We hold ourselves to the same rule with our water systems, but most of our sector does not.
Why The Sector Funds Balls But Not The Pumps
Philanthropy is organized almost entirely around the moment of creation … the drilling, the ribbon cutting and the lovely plaque that shows up in everyone’s camera rolls. Grant cycles, gala programs and capital campaigns all point to the day a project comes into existence—and few funding mechanisms in our sector are built for the years that follow.
The consequences are well documented, and research suggests that roughly one in four handpumps across sub-Saharan Africa may be broken at any given time. A deflated soccer ball is a disappointment, but a failed water system means a community has to walk for hours again for contaminated water. It means that clinics have to shut down because they can’t serve patients, and it means that girls are pulled out of school to resume the duty of carrying water.
The failure statistics are sobering, but there’s been a problem with how we interpret them. Most of those wells weren’t necessarily constructed poorly; they were funded poorly. The money that created them had no answer for the question every piece of infrastructure eventually asks: Who pays when something breaks?
How Recurring Revenue Is The Pump
There’s only one kind of funding that reliably shows up in year seven—recurring, unrestricted revenue.
Recurring donors aren’t more virtuous than grant-makers or gala guests, but their money is directed toward the real and true issue. Maintenance and upkeep are not gaps we fill once—a ball doesn’t deflate one time; it deflates over and over forever. And a deep borehole doesn’t need attention once; it needs regular maintenance and upkeep on a schedule, indefinitely. A funding stream that arrives once can’t answer a need that never stops arriving, but a funding stream that arrives every month sure can.
Our organization has completed water projects in more than 140 regions across East Africa, and every system we’ve built is still working. I’m proud of our engineering and even more proud of the community water committees that own the system. But the reason the engineers and water committees get to continue their important work is because of predictable monthly revenue, not the grant that built the system at the outset. Those grants bought the balls (an important part, for certain), but our monthly donors are the pump.
The Photo Going To The Wrong Donor
There’s an uncomfortable truth inside the soccer ball story. The donor who hands over the ball gets the photo, and the donor who thought to pack the pump gets nothing—no plaque or ribbon or moment of celebration.
But three years later, when the ball is still soaring across the playground, it’s the pump giver who is owed the gratitude.
Our sector has built its entire attribution system around the moment of creation, so donors will, of course, want to optimize for it. We hand out naming rights for buildings and put donor signs next to new wells, and we have trained generous people to fund what’s visible. The problem isn’t donor vanity—the problem is that we’ve never given them a clear way to see the pump.
This is the same distortion behind the sector’s obsession with sending “100% to the field”—we measure and celebrate visible generosity, while the kind with real consequences (the unglamorous, recurring, unrestricted kind) goes uncounted.
What We Can Do About It
If you lead or govern a nonprofit that builds anything meant to last, I think there are three shifts worth making.
First, we should treat the percentage of our revenue that recurs as a resilience metric the board reviews, not a line item buried in the development report. For-profit markets pay enormous premiums for recurring revenue because it predicts survival, and our sector should value it the same way.
Second, let’s build the pump into every ask. Each proposal should carry its long-term maintenance and community support case openly, not hide it in overhead. Donors can handle the truth—but not until we start naming it.
Third, we can stop treating monthly donors as afterthoughts. A $30/month donor isn’t a minor gift over time—structurally, that donor may be the most consequential money we have.
Back To The Field
Many of the soccer balls our travelers brought years ago are still in play—not because of who handed them over but because of who made sure there was a pump. Our monthly donors work the same way: Nobody photographs the pump, but it’s the reason the balls last.
Donors will fund the pump, though—ours do, every month. But they can’t fund a need we keep hiding in our budgets and leaving out of our asks. That part is on us.