Approaches to financing water projects have often been drawn along geographical lines, but a well-run scheme serving a secondary town and a poorly run scheme in a dense urban settlement can sit at completely different points on the same professionalisation and revenue-capability spectrum, regardless of population density. These fundamentals, not the map, are what investors and financiers actually respond to.

This session reframes the conversation around that journey: what it takes for a water system to move from dispersed and grant-dependent toward professionalised, aggregated and ultimately bankable, and which financing instruments, blended, cross-subsidised or fully commercial, become available at each stage along the way.

The panel brings together experts spanning policy, innovation and policy advisory and asset management to explore how policy shapes water investment, what resilient and sustainable solutions look like in cities and why systems-level change is needed. We will also ask where the gaps in asset lifecycle management sit, why value is lost over an asset's life rather than only at the point of investment, and how the capacity to adapt determines whether schemes deliver for finance, engineers, clients and customers.

In doing so, the panel will consider the extent to which the fundamentals that make a project financeable upfront are often the same ones that determine its longevity.

Timings:

08:15-08:30 - Arrival

08:30-10:00 - Panel Session

10:00-11:00 - Networking

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