WC145 NovDec 2025 - Magazine - Page 11
DRINKING WATER
The Last-Mile Paradox
Remote Indigenous communities are stuck with
yesterday’s solutions disguised as progress—but it
doesn’t have to be that way
BY KEYVAN MALEKI
HEN GOVERNMENTS CLAIM to be
“closing the last mile” for people in remote
and rural settings—bringing them access to
STEM advancements that enable effective,
sustainable water, energy and other critical
infrastructure—they treat proximity to completion as a
magical threshold that transforms incomplete projects
into virtually complete ones. Several of these services are
recognized by international organizations as human rights,
leaving governments to choose between investing in their
provision or investing in financial compensation for populations who continue to go without.
If we applied the same innovative, technology-first
mindset to remote Earth communities that we reserve for
proposed Mars settlements, we could solve infrastructure
challenges that have persisted for decades. Instead, we
treat temporal proximity as a substitute for substantive
progress, just as sustainability deadlines migrate from
2030 to 2050 when inconvenient. Whether promising
future achievement (“by 2030”) or claiming near completion (“last mile”), the underlying message remains:
trust the timeline, not the substance—while the actions
themselves sidestep the underlying problems.
Our activities and concerns—including sustainability measures—are self-justifying and deliver immediate,
intrinsic benefits that require no appeal to larger cosmic
purposes or apocalyptic future scenarios to be worthwhile.
That promise of the last mile feels a little more like the
35-million-mile trek between Earth and Mars, where innovation takes on a much different “can-do” attitude than
we muster here at home.
Getty Images
W
Keyvan Maleki is CEO of
Community Circle on Scaling
Business Innovation for Humanity
WAT E R C A N A D A . N E T
When it comes to innovation in underserved communities,
First Nations might as well be on Mars.
Innovation in underserved communities
When it comes to innovation in underserved communities, First Nations might as well be on Mars. When we
envision humans living on the red planet, we instinctively
frame every obstacle as a technological innovation challenge. No reliable water supply? We need better extraction
and purification systems. Intermittent energy? We need
resilient power generation designed for harsh conditions.
Limited healthcare access? We need remote diagnostics
and telemedicine infrastructure. Poor connectivity? We
need robust communication networks built for extreme
environments.
Yet when we encounter these exact challenges in remote
Canadian communities—unreliable water systems,
energy-grid failures, limited healthcare access, and spotty
broadband—we reflexively categorize them as social issues
requiring policy solutions and increased funding.
WATER C AN ADA • NOV EMBER/ DECEMBER 2025
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