Building Tech in Sierra Leone
A case study on monitoring water levels in Sierra Leone
Problem setting
Just like in other sub-saharan countries, Sierra Leone has water shortage problems. Residents of Freetown and the provinces lack water. There are a couple stakeholders in the Water and Sanitation sector like Guma Valley water company and others, but I was only privileged to engage with SALWACO(Sierra Leone Water Company).
The chain of events before water flowed in people’s homes was first, complaints. Afterwards, someone travelled to the reservoirs and reported low water levels, after which bowsers(lorries carrying water) could be alerted to fill the tanks. The process doesn’t end here, someone had to afterwards manually travel back and ascertain that this was actually done, and turn on the outlet faucet.
The problem: Water levels needed in the reservoirs to be monitored. ie My job was simple — Understand the current problem setting and afterwards build an IOT device that monitored water levels in the reserviors alerting various stake holders so that water can be refilled in the tanks
Some quick facts about initial attempts to solve this problem.
After a field study of three water reservoirs owned by SALWACO, I found out initial attempts to solve this problem included a very bulky piece of technology that had pieces in different parts of the water system:
One part at the source measuring water levels in the sea, in the water table and all sorts of goodies.
The other part sat on top of the reservoir monitoring the water level in it. It had a small interphase showing some readings. The best part about this whole system? It was solar powered and had flashy solar panels so it didn’t need power!
Why it failed
This technology looks like it solved this problem and then some! Doesn’t the government need data on water table levels? Yet residents of Freetown and even the provinces still lacked water in their taps. In fact, most of the technology wasn’t even deployed and is still sitting in government offices gathering dust.
The first point of failure is it was foreign: none of the engineers in the field couldn’t decipher any readings on the interphase: It was all in Chinese. In fact, they didn’t even have knowledge on how the whole system operated. They only pointed briefly to the numbers on the interphase but really couldn’t articulate what the readings meant or why they were important
The second part was of course brandishing flashy, bulky solar panels attracted thieves who not only took the panels but the glittering antennae as well as sensors placed strategically for these enterprising individuals. Further deployment was halted, with most of these enormous, sophisticated technologies doing nothing for fear of vandalization.
Some questions for you to think about
- How much money do you think was spent on procuring the system and installing it?
- How was the current solution accepted when no one could understand the data?
- What is the moral of the story?
Building technology in Africa is hard, just like it is anywhere else. From this project, here are my take-aways:
Painpoints
Whenever you’re tasked with building technology in Africa, or anywhere for that matter : Find out, exactly what is the problem? Is it a service is lacking? At what point does technology come in ie. Can I simply hire someone to do this and what are the implications? Where have current solutions failed? What is the simplest and cheapest solution for it?
It follows that alleviating Highest pain produces highest comfort and thus highest impact.
If you find yourself having to invest millions, solving one problem after another using sophisticated technologies, chances are that you’ve created your own problems that no one really cares about (even if they say they do). It may be as simple as sending an sms after receiving a true/false reading.
Agile is your best friend.
Iterating quickly is your friend — Getting an MVP, learning from mistakes, redesigning based off of lessons is the fastest most efficient way to navigate projects in Africa. Especially in environments where previous technologies have not been deployed, the best way to test hypotheses is in the field, right with the people you’re building it for.
Your success metrics should be directly informed by outputs in the field, not outputs in the code, or outputs in your head.
TIA (This Is Africa)
Solutions applied elsewhere may not necessarily be suitable for this environment, given the cultural and technological constraints. Understand the problem with the people, find out cultural considerations as well as societal perceptions of technology.
More often than not, the weakest link in building and deploying technology(including software) is the people part — Trust me.
I will go over our solution in a soon to come post!
