Using technology to transform African rural water supply
eWATER trials in Babati District, Tanzania
Imagine being a District Water Engineer, a member of local government in charge of ensuring that everyone in your district has access to clean water. Imagine now that you are in rural Africa, where you must rely on setting up a small committee of people in each village, with minimal education, to be in charge of keeping their village’s entire $120,000 water system operational, which the government or an NGO will have installed a few years previously. The system for distributing water in rural Africa, where household connections are rare, is to build community taps in public spaces around the village, with about 1 tap for every 200 people.
As the District Water Engineer, you need the committee to collect money from the villagers, in order to pay for the costs of operating and maintaining this huge water system. You also rely on them to manage all the operation and maintenance, calling on you and you team when needed.
The most effective way for the committee to collect the money is to assign a person to open each of the community taps for a few hours a day to collect cash from the villagers, for each bucket they fill up with water. Both you and the villagers are well aware though that, due to this being cash, it is very hard to trace and inevitably some goes missing as it passes through the hands of people standing at the taps, and the committee. This is assuming that everyone does pay for water, including close friends and family of the people collecting money, which you are also aware is not always the case.
In terms of the operations and maintenance, you are required to keep on top of this as it is key to ensuring people in your district’s rural villages have access to clean water. With limited resource within your team of district engineers, you have to trust that the committees are able to do the majority of this themselves, and inform you when larger issues occur. You also have to trust that the paper reports, which they travel over an hour by motorbike to get to you, are in fact accurate and they haven’t fudged them in order to please you, or made them up due to extensive time it takes to collect the relevant data.
In Tanzania, these two factors are major reasons that only 35% of the rural population have access to clean water (Latest routine monitoring data from the Ministry of Water and Irrigation (MoWI)).
The village committees, in a Tanzanian context, are called Community Owned Water Supply Organisations (COWSOs). The best COWSOs manage to collect enough money to cover the costs to operate the system and do minor repairs, but even in these villages NGOs and the government are often relied upon to step in to do any major repairs, meaning the systems are unsustainable.
Read more about Tanzania’s challenges with rural water in an article by Lukas Kwezi, Water and Sanitation Adviser at DFID Tanzania, at https://www.ircwash.org/blog/understanding-what-drives-maintenance-rural-water-infrastructure-tanzania-and-it%E2%80%99s-not-what-you.
eWATER is aiming to make rural water across Africa sustainable, using technology. eWATER consists of 3 products:
- eWATER taps; installed onto the current community water points and can dispense water 24/7 using contactless payment. This negates the need for cash, which ensures transparent, accountable collection of user fees at the point of use, cutting out corruption and giving villagers confidence that their money will be put to good use.
2. eWATER tags; given to each of the villagers, which they can top up with mobile money or cash, allowing them to buy water for an affordable amount. When presented at the eWATER tap, water is dispensed and credit it deducted from the tag.
3. eWATERcare; data dashboard and maintenance software that allows the district engineers, eWATER and others to monitor live usage data and status of the eWATER taps. This allows eWATER and the district engineers to efficiently use their resource to perform timely, professional maintenance to keep the water systems fully operational.
This technology is game changing in the rural water supply for Africa.
Project Background and Progress
Since being selected by Frontier Technology Livestreaming we have partnered with Water Aid Tanzania (WAT) and Nelson Mandela University (NM-AIST) and collaborated closely with the government of Tanzania. The aim of the project is to install and test 35 version 2 eWATER taps to three villages in the Babati District, to provide 10,000 people with sustainable access to clean water. We are looking to prove that by installing our taps we can collect enough money to cover all the operation and maintenance costs of the system, making the system sustainable.
Read more about the Babati District at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babati_District.
During the “scoping and design phase”, we travelled out to Tanzania with the three main objectives of:
- Engaging with relevant stakeholders
- Surveying villages to inform the decision about which villages to install the taps to
- Raise awareness locally about eWATER
During this phase we successfully chose three recipient villages in the Babati District (Gidewari, Erri and Endanachan). Water Aid suggested Gidewari and Endanachan, both of which had a fully functional water system but a COWSO that was struggling to collect sufficient funds to pay for maintenance. Erri was chosen as its entire water system is broken and did not have a COWSO, which meant we could trial the acceptance of our technology in different circumstances.
We also engaged with district engineers, local governments and the village committees, all of whom are excited about the arrival of eWATER.
After completing the “scoping and design phase”, the project entered into the “implementation phase”, which is broken into small “sprints”. The plan for our first “sprint” was to:
- Adapt our eWATER software to make it relevant to Tanzania
- Engage with, and agree a price of water, with the COWSOs of each village
- Hold official village meetings to continue the community engagement and behavioral change journey
- Repair the villages where necessary to ensure the water systems are all working
- Install the eWATER taps in the villages
With the eWATER software now available in Swahili (the language used in the majority of Tanzania), successful village meetings completed and the price of 50TZS for 20 litres of water agreed in the Gidewari and Endanachan, the two villages were fully repaired. In Erri, the conversation around price is ongoing so no village meetings or repair work has happened yet.
Members of the UK and Gambian eWATER team touched down two weeks ago in Tanzania to install the eWATER taps in the two expecting villages, starting with Gidewari.
The first two weeks in country have seen our team training local technicians to install and maintain the eWATER taps, and training eWATER “wakalas” (agents) to start registering villagers and selling tags. Gidewari and Endanachan have now had eWATER taps fully installed and eWATER tags have been sold to the majority of people in each of the villages, marking the beginning of sustainable rural water supply in Tanzania.
We have had an overwhelming reception from the villagers. eWATER agents are excited about their new jobs and the possibility to make some additional money. Everyone we have spoken to has been excited about eWATER, and the new phenomenons of being able to buy water 24/7, and the knowledge that their money will now be put to ensuring they have access to clean water forever.
#frontiertech #eWATER #Tanzania #sustainability #Africa
