When you turn on the tap one day and no water comes out, what do you do? You call the plumber or the city and complain. You need dependable and quick service, and you usually get it.

It might seem an obvious point, but a lot of development work on water and sanitation has traditionally focused more on building wells or latrines than on helping to catalyze or set up a service that will run forever and always be there when it’s needed. Surveys in various countries have found that between 50 and 80 percent of water points in Sub-Saharan Africa are dysfunctional or need repair, representing a colossal problem for those communities and big waste of money.[i]

The US government can provide invaluable support in shifting efforts of organizations working in water and sanitation from a charity to a service-oriented approach. USAID, the arm of the US government that programs foreign assistance, understands this, but they don’t have the necessary staff for a truly strategic effort. The Water for the World Act (which you can and should support) will help agencies like USAID make work water and sanitation programs that they fund more strategic by putting in place skilled, senior staff to support national systems and planning in developing countries. Making the shift won’t be easy, but it is essential.

To see how this works in practice and in honor of Global Handwashing Day, let’s take a simple example: getting kids to wash their hands in school. It’s been estimated that getting kids to wash hands with soap at key times could save a million lives a year from things like diarrhea and respiratory infections. So this is, quite literally, one of the most important things we could accomplish as a global society.

If you want school kids to wash their hands, they’re going to need soap and water. Simple right? The data suggest not. In a school WASH program in Kenya, we found out during surprise visits that only eight percent were providing soap. It forced us to dig deeper. Part of what we figured out is that Kenyan schools have no budget for providing soap regularly. We’re now working on this with the Ministry of Education.

But we know that the budget is only a small piece of the puzzle. The school administration has to prioritize buying soap, something that frequently isn’t the case, so public health officials need to come by every so often and make sure no one is asleep on the job. That official needs to have money for fuel to make it to all of the schools to check up on them. She needs to have a standardized tool to monitor the school with so that information can be compiled about how good of a job the district is doing overall. On their end, the school administration needs the budget to buy soap, but they also need training in methods to get kids to wash their hands correctly (we’re creating new social norms here!). Local stores need to sell the soap at a reasonable price and with a reliable supply chain, so now the private sector is involved as well. And I haven’t even started talking about how you make sure a school has clean water.

The simple fact is that a lot of the public and private systems we take for granted as Americans are missing in many places in the world. I’ve been to schools in Central America and Sub-Saharan Africa alike where soap wasn’t being provided to kids after they used the toilet, precisely because issues like budget or accountability haven’t been figured out.

It’s getting to this level of supporting national public and private systems that is critical if we’re ever going to move the meter in a meaningful way.To get there, major donors like the US need to definitively get beyond charity projects and think seriously and critically about how the work they are funding will lead to long-term services that are there when people need them.It means taking a backseat to the government and private sector actors who will be there long after the foreign aid dollars cease to flow.Officials in the US government realize this, but you can help give them a head start by supporting the Water for the World Act today.