Uncovering the unexpected benefits of eWATER in solving the African water crisis
In June we installed 24 version 2 eWATER taps in Gidewari and Endanachan villages in the Babati Region of Tanzania, as part of the Frontier Technology Livestreaming project, in partnership with Water Aid Tanzania and Nelson Mandela African Institute of Science and Technology. For background on the project please read my previous medium post.
The first thing to mention since then is that we came to a decision not to install eWATER taps into the third village, Erri. This decision was made after speaking to the village leaders in Erri, and the District Water Engineer, who informed us how much it would cost to repair its fully broken water system, which came to more than the project had budget for), but also because the villagers were not all ready to pay for water. This has allowed us to focus our time on the other two villages.
In Gidewari and Endanachan, eWATER remains a hit. After 4 months of field testing, and learning a lot in the meantime, we have got the technology to a place where we now feel it is a fully robust solution with any issues we have encountered being ironed out. Our data has proved that since using eWATER in the villages 100% of the water sales revenue has been collected, which has meant that at least three times more revenue is available to be spent on operations and maintenance of the water system than before. As well as this, the time taken to respond to issues arising in the water system has gone from an average of 2 to 3 weeks to under 5 hours, due to the improved visibility over the system that eWATER provides, which also cuts out costs to the local government associated with old fashioned ways of collecting data on a motorbike.
We are getting more positive quotes from the villagers about the technology than can be fitted in an article but a favorite of mine was ironically from an old tap attendant who said, “it is great, I no longer have to stand on a tap and argue with people about how much water they get. The system makes it a lot fairer”.
It has generated a lot of excitement within the district but also at a national level, with the Assistant Director of Rural Water Supply at the Ministry of Water and Irrigation (MoWI) visiting Endanachan and remarking “this is what our country has needed for ages”. We have been approached by many other parties interested in having eWATER taps installed in other districts in Tanzania such as Dar es Salaam, Arusha and Iringa, and further afield in Haiti, Nigeria and Kenya.
Back to Gidewari and Endanachan and this project though. Our main focuses have been:
- Ensuring that the version 2 eWATER tap is robust in the field
- Improving the water system to give villagers more reliable water supply
- Selecting and training resellers and scoping a new way of selling credit
Testing the version 2 eWATER tap
Despite the UK team having done countless tests of the version 2 eWATER tap in the UK, this is the first time that the version 2 eWATER taps have been trialed in Tanzania.
In the first month after installations, we expected our main focus to be ironing out any issues that arose with the new eWATER tap and gaining customer feedback. We have collected a lot of customer feedback but to this day have had no issues arise with the tap itself. We had a couple of basic software issues associated with moving from our Gambian user interface to the Swahili version for Tanzania, but they were quickly solved. The only issue we had was three taps having pieces of plastic flow through the water system, which blocked and block the flow meters in the taps. Since then we have had no occurrences of this happening again.
We have received a lot of great customer feedback from the villagers, COWSOs (Community Owned Water Supply Organisations) and District water engineers specifically around the version 2 tap:
- The version 2 eWATER tap can deal with any flow rate of water, which the version 1 was unable to do. Flow rates of over 60 litres / minute are regularly observed meaning that villagers are not waiting ages for their buckets to fill up, whereas the version 1 was only capable of 10 litres / minute flows.
- Water credit can be sold, and the taps work, in completely offline environments where there is no phone signal.
- The locally sourced solar panels and batteries that are part of the eWATER tap installation mean that the majority of the components can be replaced locally at a very small cost.
- 3 to 4 eWATER taps can be installed a day by one trained local technician, and two untrained locally hired hands meaning that eWATER can very easily be implemented in a village.
All this feedback has been great to hear and has meant the months of development into the version 2 eWATER tap have paid off!
Using the improved visibility to make village water supply more reliable
We had one morning in our office in Babati when we woke up to see all the taps in Endanachan indicating the “low flow” errors. Thinking this was an issue with all the taps, we headed to Endanachan a fair amount faster than normal, but worked out that it was not a problem with the taps, but water was not flowing through the entire system.
This highlighted yet another benefit of eWATER, which we had not anticipated; installing the taps it provides a higher level of visibility over the entire water system that no one has ever had before. We are now able to identify issues with the water system that would have been stopping the villagers collecting water long before eWATER taps were installed. The two major examples of these are:
Firstly, in both villages solar panels are relied upon to provide the energy to pump the water out of the ground. The morning mentioned above was due to a number of overcast days in a row, meaning these solar panels had not been able to pump water to the tanks that feed each of the taps around the villages: the tanks were empty. The eWATER taps were able to register this by showing “low flow” errors in all the taps. This is an incredibly exciting prospect as this may mean that over the coming months more data can be collected about this problem. If it happens regularly then the data that eWATER has generated can be used to inform decisions about making changes to the infrastructure of the water system to give people more reliable access to water. On a larger scale, this information could be used to inform the initial designs of water systems, meaning water systems are built more effectively in the future.
Secondly, one of the water tanks that feeds 6 eWATER taps in Gidewari relied on a person to flick a switch to allow the water to flow in the tank. This switch was installed in the water system before the arrival of eWATER, to ensure that water did not overflow out of the tank when it was full. Before we arrived we did not know this, or the problems it caused. Any time water did not flow through the system it was assumed that it was because the pump was not working. The eWATER taps have been able to show that the person responsible for flicking the switch was not doing their job properly, and that the tank was being left empty for days before the switch was flicked and water was allowed to flow into the taps, leaving people without water. The eWATER technology has given visibility of this problem, allowing us to identify the root cause of the issue and install a cheap float switch in the tank that automatically controls when water flows into the tank. This has cut out the need for a person to flick the switch, and given the village a more reliable water supply.
Selecting and training resellers and scoping a new way of selling credit
When we went into the villages we asked the COWSOs to help us select resellers responsible for selling eWATER credit. eWATER resellers are incentivised by the opportunity to make commission on all water sales, so the COWSO Chairman in both villages unsurprisingly selected themselves to be resellers. It quickly became apparent that both Chairmen were not right for the role due to not being that technologically savvy, and fairly elusive around the village.
We came to the agreement with the COWSOs that shop keepers made the best resellers, as they were more technology savvy, more enterprising and were always based in one place, so people knew where to find them. We also increased the number of resellers to reduce the distance people had to walk to buy credit. In Endanachan there were already mobile money agents with their own shops, so they are respected and understand the idea of taking a commission, so these proved to be perfect resellers.
Since changing the resellers we have run intensive training sessions to make sure they are able to sell credit, which have proved successful.
We have started to scope and develop a new way of selling credit, which would negate the need for resellers. Resellers have proved to add a step in the process of a user buying water, which is reliant upon people and so subject to human error. We have been scoping and developing a way for people to be able to buy mobile money directly from eWATER, and collecting their credit from the eWATER taps.
This simplifies the way that people buy credit and takes advantage of a technology that people are very familiar with, meaning less training is required and the solution being more scalable. Our development team have now got this new process ready for field testing, which will be a focus of “Sprint 2”.
That said, the process of buying credit via a reseller adds flexibility in the way that a user buys credit, and so will remain an option.
For the meaning of “sprints” and the project methodology, see this link.
Looking forward to “Sprint 2”
Leading up to the next “sprint” of the project, its main focus will be the field testing of the new method of villagers buying credit and topping up their tags using the eWATER taps, rather than via a reseller. This has been requested by the villagers because it will allow greater flexibility for villagers to buy credit and reduce reliance on resellers.
As well as this we are going to start to hand over the management of the water systems back to the COWSO and District Water Engineer, so we will provide training courses on how to use our technology to manage the system effectively. After this we will need to go through further contract negotiations with the District Water Engineer to mark the start of eWATER technology officially being used by the current water governance as a key tool to manage their water systems more effectively.
