Driving the digital future of water supply in Africa
Sotrad Water, producer of the Pump & Drink, a solar water turnkey station, partnered with Staizen to develop digital solutions to accelerate the distribution of safe drinking water for rural communities in the Ivory Coast. Learn more about the challenge, approach, solutions, and key learnings from the partnership.
Pump & Drink’s solar-powered water stations
“Before the installation of the station, we had to fetch water at 4 am to come back at 9 am, and the water wasn’t clean. Today, we instantly have water and it is safe to drink.”
Village de Lelouroukaha Villager
Many rural areas in the underserved parts of West Africa lack safe access to potable water. A considerable amount of time, averaging 4.5 hours a week, is often spent by women of the villages finding and collecting water.
To tackle the challenge, Sotrad Water, a Belgian-based company has developed solar-powered Pump & Drink stations that can serve rural communities with populations of 200 to 2,000, with safe and accessible drinking water. These stations are used to replace obsolete manual pumps or equip new boreholes and wells. The design is made durable and sustainable for the local conditions and requires little maintenance. A remote data management system sends water and energy production data to the cloud and gives information on the maintenance needs so that local technicians can respond immediately if needed.
The Challenge
“We had an idea but we didn’t know the technology, so I wanted to go to someone who I knew could give that support. I’m a strong believer in partnerships and wasn’t looking for sub-contractors. I was looking for partners and it was clear that Staizen was able to deliver on that.”
With the ambition to expand and scale the supply of safe water in the Ivory Coast, the Pump & Drink team was tasked with the grand challenge of surveying over 2,000 villages to identify suitable sites for the installation. Given the scale and scope of such an initiative, the team needed to get smart in digitizing what normally would be a manual and time-consuming process. They approached the Staizen team to develop a mobile application to support the digitalization of the audit process for their local surveyors.
The Approach & Solution
Digitalization of the survey process
“It was industrial engineers meeting software engineers. The Pump & Drink team knew the process by heart as domain experts and we came to support them in digitizing it. They had a vision for a product that needed the technical implementaton. The combination was a good fit.”
In digitalizing the process, technologies are being used in converting existing ways into more efficient and productive processes and understanding how to manage data digitally. This required each team to bring in their respective expertise — Pump & Drink’s team with the domain knowledge, and the Staizen team with the software development know-how.
Leveraging on mobile technology and practical solutions
“What’s important is to feed users with proper information, quickly and on a tool that they are actually going to look at. They don’t have computers, they don’t have WeTransfer.”
Digital solutions do not always have to be flashy or capital-intensive, it should be made to reflect the realities of the context. With mobile devices being critical infrastructures in the daily lives of the on-the-ground surveyors in the Ivory Coast, we needed to design and develop around these contexts.
We developed an Android application that can be installed by on-the-ground technicians for a range of devices and ensured that the environment can work offline given that the internet connectivity in these remote villages in the Ivory Coast is not always consistent and reliable. A serverless architecture back-end system has been done in Firebase to support the data requirements.
Data management, dashboard & reporting
“We used to do it manually, on paper or through emails, overtime it was easy to lose a lot of pictures .”
The survey process is quite long and requires a series of collaborations with the various government bodies and partners involved. There is a lot of data collected — technicians take multiple photos which requires a large amount of data volume collected and sent.
It was important for the solution to optimize the approval process with various validation workflows and the size of the pictures to lower the cost of hosting. A key feature was also being able to capture and share data across given that the team needed to collaborate across several continents.
Impact
The digital future of water
“ My conversations and partnership with Staizen has shown that building digital application has its challenges but is not rocket science and that it can be doable. This project has triggered that we really need to think about digitalization of our processes from day 1.”
Digitalization and digital technologies offer unlimited potential to transform the water industry to become more cost-effective, innovative, and efficient. This process proves to be a great way to accelerate the grand ambition of the Sotrad Water team to meet the Sustainable Developmental Goals # 6 Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all.
“We are excited by this partnership as there are immense opportunities for digital transformation in the sector. Working for emerging markets such as West Africa has been a great learning experience because everything has to be mobile-first and made to adjust to the design constraints of the region.”
Training for the project is currently being rolled out in the Ivory Coast and a pilot was run for a project in Cameroon. Both were very well received, particularly the feature around a faster approval process that integrates governmental bodies, which is usually very time-consuming for people on the ground. Despite some delays because of Covid-19, the team is optimistic to launch and conduct over 2,000+ surveys in late 2021.
You can catch Pump & Drink speaking about their digitalization initiatives at Change Now online summit — the world’s largest event for the planet happening on the 27, 28, 29 May 2021.
Staizen is a digital transformation company that partners with clients to engineer transformation and make better technology-backed decisions with sustainably architected solutions.
If you are interested in exploring how digitalization can help support your organization to scale and optimize processes, don’t hesitate to reach out to our team.
