Who Benefits from Egypt’s Solar Water Stations in South Sudan?

When water tankers fail to reach Juba Nabari, Betty Elias cannot simply turn on a household tap and wait for the supply to return. The South Sudanese mother, who lives with her five children, dug a well about four metres deep beside her home so the family would have something to rely on when poor roads kept tankers away for days. Yet the water that came out of the ground was salty, leaving them with a source that could be used for some household chores but not for drinking. In testimony published by InfoNile in July 2024, Elias recalled that her family sometimes went for more than three days without drinking water, while a barrel of clean water could cost 3,000 South Sudanese pounds. Although her household is not known to use any of the groundwater stations financed by Egypt, her experience captures the wider problem the programme was designed to address: in South Sudan, having water nearby does not necessarily mean having water that is safe, affordable and available when families need it. Two years later, that promise of reliable water was on display at the University of Juba, where South Sudanese and Egyptian officials gathered in July 2026 to commission SOMBA, a solar-powered groundwater station financed by Egypt. South Sudan’s Minister of Water Resources and Irrigation, James Mawich Makuach, officially opened the facility. According to the ministry, the station was expected to provide safe and reliable drinking water to around 40,000 people at the university and in surrounding communities. The ceremony presented SOMBA as part of a broader effort to strengthen water security through infrastructure that can operate without a constant supply of diesel or a conventional electricity grid. That is an important advantage in a country where roads, fuel supplies and public utilities can all be unreliable. Yet when this investigation compared public claims about the programme with newly obtained Egyptian project records, South Sudanese official information and Nile Basin Initiative data, the numbers behind the inaugurations became harder to interpret. By August 17, 2026, 26 of the programme’s 28 planned stations had been completed, and official monitoring records contained no reports of faults severe enough to stop those completed facilities from operating or being used. However, some figures publicly described as numbers of “beneficiaries” were not based on people counted at water points or on households surveyed in the field. Instead, key project estimates were calculated from tank capacity and an assumed level of daily water consumption. That distinction does not mean the stations are failing, nor does it diminish the infrastructure that has been built. It does, however, change what the evidence can establish about the programme’s impact. The available records provide far more information about how many stations were constructed than about how much water each produces, how regularly that water is available, whether its quality remains within drinking-water standards or how many people rely on each facility in practice. 28 stations planned, 26 completed According to Aref Gharib, head of the Nile Water Affairs Sector at Egypt’s Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation, the programme consists of 28 groundwater drinking-water stations implemented through four contracting operations with a combined value of approximately $6.205 million. Eight stations fall under a $1.627 million contract with the Egyptian African Company for Development Projects, while two contracts carried out by Neem Investment and Oilfield Services cover another 14 at a combined cost of roughly $2.611 million. The remaining six were implemented by the Sudanese Egyptian Investment Group under a contract valued at $1.967 million. Although public reporting around the July 2026 inauguration frequently referred to a programme of 28 stations, the ministry’s updated records draw an important distinction between what was contracted and what had actually been completed. By August 17, 26 stations were finished, while Bithai and Balowini remained under construction. The figure of 28 therefore described the full programme rather than 28 completed facilities already supplying water. The completed facilities are spread across Juba and surrounding areas as well as Jonglei State, with project records referring to locations including Dr John Garang University, Bor Hospital, the University of Juba, Kabo, Kabori, Rajaf East, Jebel Lemon, Jebel Lado, Yaba, Tombur and Sandro. Yet even a completed station cannot automatically be treated as a fully handed-over facility, because construction, inauguration and transfer of responsibility do not always happen at the same time. That overlap is visible at SOMBA, which had already been publicly inaugurated. Shaaban Abu El Fotouh, head of the Egyptian Irrigation Mission in South Sudan, explained that the station nevertheless remained under the contractor’s responsibility until final handover. Assessing the programme therefore requires separating infrastructure that has been contracted from infrastructure that has physically been completed, and then distinguishing both from stations whose operation and maintenance have formally passed to the South Sudanese side. Once those stages are separated, a question more important than the construction count comes into view: how many people actually rely on the water the stations provide? When a beneficiary is a calculation In January 2024, Egypt’s water ministry announced that around 20 solar-powered groundwater stations were serving approximately 100,000 people, implying an average of about 5,000 beneficiaries for each station. At the same time, the ministry announced eight additional facilities, including three in Lobonok and five in Jonglei State. By July 2026, however, public reporting linked the expanded programme of 28 stations to more than 84,000 beneficiaries. Read side by side, the announcements produced an apparently contradictory picture: the number of planned stations had increased by 40 percent, while the headline figure for people served was lower than the number previously associated with only 20 stations. The comparison does not prove that fewer people were receiving water. The earlier figure was approximate, the later one was expressed as a minimum, and the announcements did not explain whether exactly the same methodology had been used. What the discrepancy exposed was a more basic problem: the public numbers did not make clear what the programme meant when it called someone a “beneficiary”. Gharib’s response to this investigation helps explain how at least some of those numbers were produced. For newer stations, according to Gharib, project calculations are based on a storage tank with a capacity of 32,000 litres and an assumed daily consumption of 6.5 litres per person for drinking and household uses. Dividing the tank capacity by that assumed consumption produces an estimate of 4,923 people, which the project rounds to roughly 5,000 beneficiaries for each station. The six older stations are calculated differently because their storage tanks hold 9,000 litres, with project tables estimating that each can serve around 2,000 people. In both cases, the figure describes how many people the available volume could theoretically support under the project’s assumptions rather than how many residents have actually been counted collecting water. Applying the same methodology across the programme produces a theoretical service capacity of roughly 120,000 people once all 28 stations are completed. Because Bithai and Balowini belong to the newer eight-station package, the project formula assigns each of them roughly 5,000 theoretical beneficiaries. Excluding those two unfinished stations leaves an equivalent estimate of around 110,000 for the 26 completed facilities. Those figures are useful for describing the infrastructure’s design capacity, but they cannot demonstrate that 110,000 people currently use the stations or depend on them every day. Public accounts have also shifted between different units, making comparisons even harder. Some reports described individual stations as serving more than 3,000 people, while others referred to more than 3,000 families. The two measures are not equivalent, because the same number of families represents a far larger population than the same number of individual users. At the University of Juba, the difference is wider still. South Sudan’s water ministry estimated that SOMBA would serve around 40,000 people, while the Egyptian calculation for a newer station with a 32,000-litre tank produces a theoretical capacity closer to 5,000. The 40,000 figure may describe the wider population within SOMBA’s potential service area rather than daily users, or the South Sudanese ministry may be using a different estimate of output. Either way, the public documents reviewed for this investigation do not explain how the two figures relate. Taken together, the records show that “beneficiary” has been used for several different measures — theoretical capacity, residents within a service area, families and actual users — that cannot be compared as if they were the same thing. Until those categories are separated, headline beneficiary totals cannot reliably show how many people regularly use the stations or whether the programme’s reach is increasing. Water insecurity goes beyond scarcity The need for more precise measurement is especially important in South Sudan, where the drinking-water crisis cannot be explained simply by a lack of water. Although the White Nile crosses the country and seasonal floods can submerge large areas, reliable access to safe drinking water remains limited for much of the population. The South Sudan Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey 2025, carried out by the National Bureau of Statistics with UNICEF and development partners and released in April 2026, sampled 12,000 households and successfully interviewed more than 10,000 across all states and administrative areas. It found that 56 percent of the population had access to basic drinking water, leaving almost half without even that level of service. That measure itself has limits, because “basic” access generally means using an improved source that can be reached within a 30-minute round trip. It does not necessarily mean that water is always available or consistently safe to drink. Water that is safely managed, by contrast, must also be available when needed and meet quality standards. South Sudanese officials describe a system in which producing additional water is only part of the challenge. Sultan Lam Tungwar, undersecretary at the Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation, has linked high water prices in Central Equatoria partly to limited treatment capacity. Inadequate secondary distribution networks also make it difficult to move available water into rapidly expanding neighbourhoods. Because the government’s longer-term aim is to reduce dependence on commercial tankers by connecting households directly to piped water, groundwater stations occupy an important but limited place within that larger system. They can bring water closer to communities that conventional networks do not reach, but they cannot by themselves solve the challenge of moving sufficient safe water from its source to every household that needs it. Those weaknesses can become more severe when weather extremes hit. A Nile Basin Initiative hydrological outlook found that flooding in 2024 affected around 300,000 people and as many as 50,000 families across 18 counties in seven states. The inundated area expanded by roughly 13,000 square kilometres in only four days, between July 11 and July 15. Although flooding can leave communities surrounded by water, it can simultaneously make safe drinking water harder to obtain by contaminating water points, cutting roads and disrupting tanker deliveries. Under those conditions, decentralised groundwater stations can offer an important advantage because they provide local supplies without relying entirely on a conventional distribution system or continuous diesel deliveries. That vulnerability extends beyond hydrology, because failures in safe-water access can quickly become health and humanitarian risks. In an April 2026 joint warning, FAO, UNICEF and WFP said conflict, mass displacement, climate shocks and flooding were deepening South Sudan’s crisis, while outbreaks including cholera were compounding the pressure on already vulnerable communities. With nearly 300,000 people displaced in Jonglei alone, the agencies, together with the Nutrition and WASH clusters, called sustained funding for clean water and sanitation critical to preventing further deterioration. For the June-to-September 2026 season, Nile Basin Initiative forecasts also indicated a probability above 80 percent of below-normal rainfall in four South Sudanese basins, alongside a probability exceeding 85 percent of above-normal temperatures. Against that background, Gharib said the Egyptian programme was intended to provide local and sustainable drinking-water sources in places where conventional networks are weak and regular access to fuel is difficult. The same environmental pressures that strengthen the case for decentralised water supplies also make the precise location of each station important, because a facility repeatedly exposed to flooding may face different risks from one serving an area under intense dry-season pressure. The Nile Basin Initiative already operates hydrological monitoring sites in South Sudan, including Juba, Nimule, Mangalla, Wau, Malakal and Ankediar, but a complete public list of verified coordinates for the Egyptian-funded stations is not available. Without those coordinates, the facilities cannot be systematically compared with flood zones, population patterns, drought exposure and other indicators that could help determine whether the investment is reaching the communities facing the greatest need. Functioning does not always mean uninterrupted While the beneficiary figures expose one weakness in measuring the programme’s reach, officials provided considerably more information about what happens after construction. Gharib explained that each facility goes through an initial and a final handover to the South Sudanese side, after which the relevant authorities assume responsibility for operation and maintenance. Egyptian officials nevertheless continue to track the condition of the stations through communication with South Sudanese institutions. Abu El Fotouh said post-handover follow-up involves South Sudan’s Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation, local chiefs and the administrations of universities, hospitals and other institutions benefiting from the stations. According to Abu El Fotouh, when a fault is reported, the South Sudanese ministry coordinates with local bodies to arrange repairs and provide spare parts. At stations inside universities and hospitals, those institutions also participate in monitoring operation and maintenance, while South Sudanese authorities draw on workers who took part in construction and gained practical experience in drilling wells, installing pumps, erecting tanks and setting up solar systems. A June 2025 final evaluation of UNICEF’s separate Sustainable WASH for Resilience Project shows why those arrangements can matter after construction ends. Commissioned by UNICEF and conducted by Muthengo Development Solutions, the evaluation examined a five-year programme implemented with the South Sudanese government across four states. Although it found that more than 340,000 people had gained access to safe water, it warned that long-term sustainability remained vulnerable to weak spare-parts supply chains, limited community financing for operation and maintenance, and continued reliance on external support. The UNICEF evaluation did not examine the Egyptian-funded stations, but it identifies pressures that decentralised water systems operating in the same national context may have to overcome. A separate water project in Jonglei provides a useful example of what more detailed sustainability reporting can look like. In November 2025, South Sudan’s government and UNICEF inaugurated the Bor Urban Water Supply System, designed to serve more than 96,000 residents. The scheme comprises a treatment plant with a capacity of 4,800 cubic metres a day, 28 water kiosks, a 53-kilometre distribution network, a 750-cubic-metre storage tank and an equipped water-quality laboratory. It also uses a 240-kWp off-grid solar installation intended to reduce operating costs and dependence on diesel. Although Bor is a much larger urban treatment-and-distribution scheme and cannot be compared directly with an individual groundwater station, the information published around its commissioning illustrates the kinds of indicators that make claims of sustainability easier to test. Noala Skinner, UNICEF Representative in South Sudan, said access to clean and safe water was “not just about meeting basic needs,” while a UNICEF field note on the project linked long-term service delivery to institutional capacity, system maintenance and renewable-energy integration. For residents, those questions are immediate rather than administrative. “Before the station was built, we depended mainly on water delivered by tankers, and sometimes we had to wait for days or pay prices that many families could barely afford,” said Kenyi Loro, a resident of Rajaf, south of Juba. “Since the station began operating, water has become much closer and easier to obtain, especially during periods when the roads are difficult. What matters to us now is that the pumps keep working and that the water remains safe.” “Before this water point opened, we often had to walk much farther to find water, especially during the dry season, and sometimes the journey took a large part of the morning,” said Peter Deng, a resident of Jonglei State. “The station has made water easier to reach, but there are still days when the flow becomes weak or stops for a while, so families try to collect enough whenever it is available. What we need most is for the supply to remain reliable and for someone to check the water regularly.” Monitoring tables approved and stamped by South Sudan’s Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation on August 17, 2026, marked all 26 completed stations as sustainable and contained no reports of faults that had prevented them from operating or being used, according to Abu El Fotouh. Those records show that post-handover monitoring exists, making it inaccurate to suggest that officials have no information about whether the facilities remain functional. They do not, however, quantify day-to-day reliability. Research elsewhere in South Sudan illustrates that distinction. In a PLOS ONE study published in July 2024, Berhe Etsay Tesfay and colleagues from Médecins Sans Frontières and South Sudan’s Ministry of Health analysed 2021 survey data from the Bentiu displacement camp. They found that although 95 percent of surveyed households reported using potable water sources or tap stands, only 68.9 percent said water was available at least six days a week, and 51.4 percent reported being able to fill their containers before the tap stopped running. Because the Bentiu study did not examine any of the Egyptian-funded stations, it cannot establish how frequently those facilities operate. It does, however, show why the absence of a disabling fault is not equivalent to measured uptime: a station can remain technically functional while households experience shorter interruptions, declining pumping rates or other service problems. For the Egyptian programme, the most precise conclusion supported by the records is that authorities had received no reports of disabling faults at the 26 completed facilities as of August 17. Bithai and Balowini were not included because they remained under construction, while SOMBA remained under the contractor’s responsibility pending final handover. Photographic documentation adds another layer of evidence, showing drilling, construction of foundations and tanks, installation of solar structures and distribution points, follow-up visits, handover ceremonies and people collecting water at some project locations. Although those images can establish that infrastructure was built and that water was available when particular sites were photographed, they cannot reveal how many hours a pump ran during the following month, how much water it produced over a year or how long an interruption lasted. The gap in the public record is therefore not the absence of monitoring, but the absence of a regular station-by-station operating history showing actual production, operating hours, downtime and repairs. Verified user counts and water-quality results are addressed separately below. Safe water requires more than a working pump Even a detailed record of operating hours would answer only part of the question, because a drinking-water station ultimately has to show not only that water comes out of its taps, but that the water remains safe. The Nile Basin Initiative says its regional water-quality database contains tens of thousands of physical and chemical analyses from across the basin, indicating that substantial monitoring capacity already exists at regional level. Yet the public information reviewed for this investigation did not contain a regular series of water-quality results linked specifically to the Egyptian-funded stations. That gap does not mean the stations supply unsafe water, nor does it prove that testing has not taken place, because results may exist in government laboratories or internal project files. Without station-level results in the public record, however, it is impossible to track whether water quality changes over time or whether individual facilities consistently meet drinking-water standards. Research on South Sudan’s groundwater shows why testing individual sites matters. In a paper published in Hydrogeology Journal in May 2022, a hydrogeologist combined existing evidence from across South Sudan with extensive field surveys in Lakes State. The researcher described groundwater data in the country as scarce and found substantial variation between locations, including generally low salinity and nitrate levels at many tested points, but brackish groundwater in some areas and nitrate concentrations above the WHO drinking-water limit at a small number of sites. Because the research focused largely on Lakes State and did not test the Egyptian-funded facilities, its results cannot be used to judge the water produced by this programme. They do, however, show why groundwater quality cannot be assumed to be uniform across South Sudan. Regular station-level testing for bacterial contamination, nitrates, salinity, fluoride and other relevant indicators would allow claims of “safe and reliable drinking water” to be checked against measurements collected over time rather than relying mainly on descriptions made when facilities are commissioned. Beyond the inauguration numbers Across the programme, the available evidence shows substantial physical infrastructure whose social impact remains harder to measure with the same precision. Egypt has committed more than $6.2 million to groundwater stations in a country where a large share of the population still lacks basic drinking-water access. By mid-August 2026, 26 facilities had been completed, local arrangements existed for operation and maintenance, and official records contained no reports of disabling faults at those completed stations. South Sudanese officials clearly regard investment in water infrastructure as necessary. Makuach’s ministry has presented SOMBA as part of a broader effort to expand safe and sustainable supplies, while Tungwar has acknowledged that Juba’s larger water crisis requires both greater production and stronger distribution networks. The number of people whose water access has actually changed because of the Egyptian programme is much harder to establish. Figures of more than 84,000, approximately 100,000 and a theoretical capacity of roughly 120,000 emerge from different stages of the project and from different assumptions, while references to individuals, families, design capacity and wider service populations make direct comparison difficult. That emphasis on measurement also echoes the language used by the Nile Basin Initiative itself. During Nile Day in Juba in February 2026, the NELSAP-CU regional coordinator argued that “Regional cooperation must translate into real infrastructure and measurable impact.” In the Egyptian programme, the infrastructure is increasingly visible; what remains harder to establish is the measurable impact at each station once construction and handover are complete. A more transparent measure of impact could begin with a shared station-level register published by Egyptian and South Sudanese authorities. Such a register would show where each facility is located, when it was completed and handed over, and which institution is responsible for it. It would also record how much water each station produces, how often it stops, what maintenance it requires, whether its water passes regular quality tests and how many people actually use it. Combined with Nile Basin Initiative data on flooding, rainfall, hydrology and water-quality monitoring, alongside national socioeconomic evidence such as the South Sudan MICS, such a record could show more than how many stations have been built. It could also show whether they are reaching the communities facing the greatest need, which facilities are under the greatest environmental pressure and where repairs or future investment would have the greatest effect. For families living with South Sudan’s water insecurity, however, the measure of success is more immediate than any beneficiary calculation. A programme may cost millions of dollars, a station may be marked “sustainable” in an official table and a storage tank may theoretically provide water for thousands of people, but those figures have meaning only if safe water is still available when a family needs it. When SOMBA was inaugurated at the University of Juba, water flowed from the taps as officials and cameras watched. The more important test begins once the ceremony is over: whether that water is still flowing months and years later, whether it remains safe to drink, and whether anyone is consistently counting the people whose daily lives depend on it. The post Who Benefits from Egypt’s Solar Water Stations in South Sudan? first appeared on Dailynewsegypt.