Max Foundation

Every year, development programmes invest millions in child health. And every year, many of those gains disappear when the funding ends.

The Healthy Village Programme in Ethiopia was built to do the opposite: not to deliver services, but to make Ethiopia's own systems better at delivering them. In every village where it worked, it tested one question: can this run inside government, without donor funding?

Over five years, across woredas (districts) in Amhara and Tigray Max Foundation worked alongside the Government of Ethiopia, Plan International, iDE, and ORDA Ethiopia, with funding from the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, testing integrated water, nutrition and maternal health approaches village by village.

What survived that test is now being carried into national policy. The government's Malnutrition-Free Village model has been brought together with the Healthy Village approach and has now become the Malnutrition-Free Healthy Village model. It’s national guidelines will be published as the unit of scale for the Seqota Declaration, Ethiopia's commitment to end child stunting, with the ambition of reaching 125 million people across all 1,050 of the country's woredas by 2030.

Read the full story on how a five-year programme end up shaping a country's national health policy: https://bit.ly/Healthy-Village

Where there was no market for menstrual hygiene products, Lata Debi built one.

She is one of 63 Health Promotion Agents in Bangladesh's Healthy Village Urban programme, most of whom started with no business experience. Lata now earns a monthly profit of 15,000 to 18,000 taka (€105 to €126), and her peers elected her district president of their association. As one young customer put it: “Earlier, I was shy to buy sanitary pads. Now I buy comfortably from Lata Aunty.”

Health products reaching families through a business that pays its owner. That is how impact lasts.

📖 Read Lata's story in our Impact Report 2025: https://maxfoundation.org/impact-report-2025/

Impact Report 2025 - Max Foundation Impact Report 2025: Scaling What Lasts. Read more on how our child-health work is taking root in government systems in Ethiopia, Bangladesh and Nepal.

Safe water in rural Bangladesh isn't only an access problem. It's a market design problem.
95% of rural households have no access to piped water. They rely on tube wells, ponds, boreholes — often contaminated with arsenic, iron, or salinity. And they pay for it: up to €14 a month in water-related illness costs alone.

The water is unaffordable? Not exactly. The market to deliver it safely just doesn't exist yet at scale.

That's what Max TapWater is building. More than 100 decentralised piped water mini-grids across southern Bangladesh. 22,000 people with 24/7 safe water piped directly into their homes. A network of local entrepreneurs running each grid as a viable business — because when the service stops, the business stops.

Communities served have already seen a 40% reduction in waterborne diseases. The goal: every rural household in Bangladesh reached through a locally operated, commercially viable water grid.

Read more about what it takes to strengthen safe water market systems: https://maxfoundation.org/white_paper/water-market-systems/

Safe water Market Systems: what it takes to make it work - Max Foundation Safe water in rural Bangladesh isn’t only an access problem. It’s also a market design problem. Here’s how Max TapWater is solving it through a commercially viable social enterprise model.