Mobile technology boosts access to clean water for the poor

Water management by SMS

A mobile-to-web platform designed to regulate water management is improving water delivery in West Africa.

The mWater service – used by 240 small public-private piped-water schemes in Senegal, Mali, Benin, and Niger – allows water-service operators to share information with national authorities and financial institutions via mobile phone.

Text messages provide data about water-production levels, account balances, and service disruptions. mWater generates real-time reports and also archives data to provide water-scheme managers with monthly reports, which can be emailed or downloaded.

Today, more than 25 percent of rural and small-town populations in western and central Africa are served by small piped-water schemes, a proportion that is expected to rise to 80 percent by 2015, according to the Manobi Development Foundation.

Smart hand pumps

Experts estimate that a third of handpumps supplying water to some of the world's poorest people are broken at any given time, according to Rob Hope, a researcher at Britain’s University of Oxford Mobile/Water for Development (MW4D) program.

Hope is part of a team developing a mobile system that coordinates access to, payment for, and upkeep of hand pumps, which are often installed and then left for the local community to manage with varying success.

The "smart hand pumps" automatically transmit water use and performance data over the mobile network, sending a text message to alert engineers of a breakdown.

Data provides water output estimates that show fluctuations in daily to seasonal demand levels. The mobile application is being tested in 70 villages in Kenya's drought-prone Kyuso district, as part of a year-long pilot project funded by Britain's Department for International Development (DFID).

Hand-pump service centers

More than half of India’s village hand pumps are not working and remain out of use for more than 30 days due to a shortage of mechanics, according to WaterAid.

In response, the charity has set up hand pump service centers, known locally as Public Panchayat Participatory (PPP) centers, operated by locally trained mechanics in two districts of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar states.

The condition of village hand pumps is monitored by the centers and repairs coordinated by mobile phone.

Between January 2011 and March 2012, the centers oversaw the repair of more than 4,500 hand pumps serving almost 338,000 people, according to WaterAid.

Only 6 percent of the repairs took longer than two days to complete, and this was usually down to remote location, the need for major work, or a lack of spare parts, the charity says.

• This article originally appeared at AlertNet, a humanitarian news site operated by the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

• Sign up to receive a weekly selection of practical and inspiring Change Agent articles by clicking here.

Previous

1 | 2