Built With, Not For: Real Development in Action

In Hauloto, a water tank system and a community working together show what climate resilience looks like when it's built from the ground up

April 13, 2026

Person with blurred face wearing white polka-dot dress and a colorful lei under canopy outdoors. — Mele ‘Elevesi Vao returned home for her community. Today, with reliable water, she’s able to give more back to it.

UNDP

At the villages of Hauloto and Fualu, on the main island of Tongatapu, mornings used to begin with uncertainty. For the 43 households that make up this small community, access to safe and reliable water was never something to take for granted. Collecting it, storing it, rationing it; these were not inconveniences. They were a vital cog to the rhythm of daily life.

That is beginning to change.

Among those who have felt that change most keenly is Mele 'Elevesi Vao, a woman who knows the importance of community. After years living in New Zealand, she returned to Hauloto and found something she had not expected to miss quite so much: the quality of community that exists here. The way people show up for each other. The shared sense of responsibility for the place and the people around you, and the knowledge that people hold in relation to place.

She returned to mulberry trees and root crops that thrive in Hauloto’s rich, volcanic soil; to the village garden and the quiet work of growing things. But water, or the lack of it, made that work harder than it needed to be. Now, with a newly-installed water tank serving the community, something has shifted. The trees are better tended. The crops come more easily. And the daily effort that water insecurity once demanded has been quietly returned; the hours and energy redirected back into the life she chose to come home to.

This is what community looks like.

Group of people in colorful traditional clothes posing before a tall monument; tropical setting.

Water tower on tall concrete supports with ladder, green tank, and cloudy sky.

It is also, as it turns out, what development looks like when it works. Led by Tonga's Ministry of Meteorology, Energy, Information, Disaster Management, Environment, Climate Change and Communications (MEIDECC) and supported through the UN Development Programme's Governance for Resilient Development programme (Gov4Res), the Hauloto and Fualu initiatives were conceived not as something delivered to the community, but built with it. That distinction, community-led rather than community-targeted, is at the heart of why it works, and why it endures.

At the commissioning event, MEIDECC's Chief Executive Office, Sione 'Akau'ola, captured the moment plainly. This, he said, was real development work in action. Partners working together with people for the benefit of the people, through the principles of Public – Private – People - Partnership.

It is a simple formulation. It is also the right one.

Mele 'Elevesi’s story is not an anomaly. Across Hauloto, the change is tangible in the specific, ordinary ways that matter most. Families describe the relief of knowing water will be there; not hoped for, not rationed against an uncertain sky, but reliably, safely available. For women and girls who have shouldered the greatest burden of water collection, hours once spent are quietly being returned. For children, it is one less disruption to the rhythm of school and play. These are not dramatic transformations. They are the ordinary dignities that water security makes possible, and which its absence quietly erodes.

Two people outdoors; one wearing a lei presents a plaque with a seal, palm trees in the background.

Chain-link fence with sign reading 'TONGA HALLITO' and blue, red balloons; palm trees behind.

The initiative is designed to go further than Hauloto. Grounded in risk-informed planning and practical in its approach, it is the kind of solution that is being understood, replicated, and scaled across Tonga. It is also a proven one. The same approach, tested across 15 schools in Tonga, has already extended school days, improved attendance, and brought students back to rural classrooms where water was once a barrier. MEIDECC has now adopted this model nationally, embedding it within Tonga's development strategy through to 2035.

This year, that message carries particular weight. The Pacific will host a pre-COP meeting in Fiji in October, bringing renewed international attention to a region that has long lived on the frontlines of climate change. What the Hauloto and Fualu communities demonstrate is that adaptation, at its most effective, looks less like a grand intervention and more like a water tank, an engaged community, and institutions willing to listen before they act.

This work has been made possible through the commitment of partners who understand that resilience built locally is resilience that lasts. Australia, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea, Sweden, and the United Kingdom have each contributed to making Gov4Res — and initiatives like this one across the Pacific — a reality.

In Hauloto, the commissioning of the new water tank was marked quietly, with presence, with gratitude, and with a clear sense that something real had been accomplished. Not promised. Not planned. It has been delivered.

Mele 'Elevesi, who came home from New Zealand to her village and her people, understands this instinctively. She came back because of what community means.

That, perhaps, is the clearest measure of development that works. Not the volume of the announcement, but what remains after everyone has gone home.