Design a Solar-Powered Water Kiosk Model for Underserved Peri-Urban Communities in Northern Nigeria

Cities like Kano, Kaduna, Sokoto, and Maiduguri are surrounded by rapidly expanding peri-urban areas where grid electricity is unreliable, boreholes exist but often lack pumping infrastructure, and household water expenditure is high relative to income. Families frequently pay more per litre to water vendors than wealthier urban households pay through piped networks, because the middle layer of storage and distribution is missing. Solar-powered borehole and kiosk systems have been deployed in parts of Nigeria and the Sahel with varying success. The ones that fail tend to do so not for technical reasons but for operational ones: no plan for who manages the kiosk, no mechanism for covering maintenance costs, no pricing model that balances affordability and sustainability. The ones that work treat the kiosk as a small business, not a charity. You will design a solar-powered water kiosk model for a peri-urban community of 500 to 1,000 households in northern Nigeria. Your submission should include: a technical specification sheet covering solar array sizing, pump and storage requirements, and dispensing mechanism; a pricing model with a clear rationale for how you arrived at it; an operating model identifying who runs the kiosk, how they are compensated, and how maintenance costs are covered; and a one-page risk register identifying the three most likely failure modes and how the design addresses them. You do not need to be an engineer to do this well. Strong submissions will show evidence-based thinking: real solar equipment prices, actual water consumption figures for northern Nigerian households, and realistic cost of living numbers. Work that pulls prices from international databases without adjusting for the Kano or Sokoto context will be marked down. The goal is a model someone could actually pilot, not a concept that only works in a spreadsheet.