Marketing water at the local household level involves significant trading in social capital. A financially sustainable model of community water management that builds on this neighbourhood social capital has been adopted in Angola. Water selling is the largest sub-sector of Luanda’s extensive informal economy, involving extractors, transporters and retailers. The majority of Angola’s peri-urban population still rely on informal mechanisms for its water supply because the State’s post-war reconstruction programmes to provide water to all remain incomplete. Communities have used informal mechanisms to fill the gap. The article is drawn from research using qualitative tools and tracking of the supply-chain to analyze the scope of the informal water economy in Angola. The community management model MoGeCA has been adopted by the government for implementation across the country. The article is written from a practitioner point of view based on more than a decade of experimentation in practice and support from USAID in taking MoGeCA to the national scale.