This blog post draws from the GSMA Mobile for Development Utilities Annual Report and from the programme’s recent participation in the Stockholm World Water Week. It is the fifth in a series of blogs, highlighting the main findings from the Annual Report.
Increasingly, water service providers (both traditional utilities and decentralised service providers) see the value of mobile tools in identifying maintenance needs, improving revenue collection, and creating accountability among all stakeholders. From basic services like SMS to more sophisticated mobile apps and GSM-enabled sensors, water service providers are using mobile tools to enable data-driven operations. Throughout World Water Week (WWW) in Stockholm, this theme from our Annual Report was a hot topic.
At the event, the World Bank Group’s Water and Sanitation Program highlighted that the existing funding for the water and sanitation sector is insufficient to meet the Sustainable Development Goals, explaining the importance of attracting commercial investment into the sector. One way to encourage private sector financing is to optimise the efficiency of water utilities to make them credit-worthy. Reducing non-revenue water (NRW) and improving utilities’ revenue collection rates were some of the key means of achieving this outcome.
Mobile technology can reduce non-revenue water
Non-revenue water, or the losses that result from leaking pipes, and poor billing and revenue collection, is one of the biggest issues traditional water utilities face. When water utilities cannot collect money for the water they produce, treat and deliver, they cannot pay for maintenance, expansion nor for high quality staff, leading to a downward spiral of service that is amplified by unhappy consumers withholding payment.
Mobile technology provides key solutions to reducing non-revenue water and improving collection rates, as proven by Wonderkid and Manobi, grantees of the Mobile for Development (M4D) Utilities programme. Wonderkid is supporting four utilities in Kenya to use three systems that reduce non-revenue water:
- A mobile app for meter readers that allows meters to be photographed and meter reading activities to be verified in real-time,
- A self-meter reading and payment system for customers to get their bill via SMS and pay with mobile money, and
- A complaint management system for customers to call or SMS about issues or report leakages.
Within several months of using these systems, the Kisumu Water and Sewerage Company (KIWASCO) has already seen a reduction in non-revenue water from 50 per cent to 43 per cent (partly attributable to improved data accuracy) and a rise in payment collection from 89 per cent to 95 per cent.
Similarly, Manobi has developed tools to help private rural water service providers become investable by using mobile money to improve their revenue collection and by providing them a Profit and Loss tool that should facilitate obtaining credit from commercial banks. This perfectly illustrates the concept of blended finance that the World Bank Group was exposing at World Water Week.
Mobile tools for monitoring of water quality and service
Monitoring water services with mobile tools, whether in the form of smartphone field apps or GSM-enabled machine-to-machine sensors, is increasingly important for reducing non-revenue water in piped scenarios and ensuring functionality of decentralised services. Safe Water Networks operates decentralised water treatment stations where consumers purchase clean, treated, drinkable water. In India, they have developed a remote monitoring system to capture real-time data on operational performance criteria. In Ghana, through the GSMA grant, they are trialing a tablet app that allows station managers to report water quality metrics in real-time, as well as sales and financial data, or the need for maintenance.
Knowledge sharing across sectors
Another key theme at World Water Week has been the need for the water and sanitation sectors to learn from, and work with other sectors such as energy. While water and energy models face different challenges, the M4D Utilities programme has found great value in facilitating knowledge sharing across sectors. Off-grid energy services are seeing tremendous growth thanks to pay-as-you-go models that let customers prepay via mobile money for solar energy – either as an ongoing service model, or as loan repayment towards ownership of a solar home system.
Water and sanitation service providers are also looking at how mobile money can support their businesses. For example, Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor’s (WSUP) Clean Team operates a container-based sanitation business model in Kumasi, but collecting customer payments has been a major obstacle, as Neil Jeffery of WSUP explained during WWW in a session convened by the Toilet Board Coalition and the Antenna Foundation.
The M4D Utilities team was pleased to facilitate sharing of knowledge between Persistent Energy Ghana, a pay-as-you-go solar grantee from our first phase of grants, around their learnings using mobile money, with the Clean Team. You can also read about some of those learnings here.
The conversations at World Water Week converged towards the same conclusions as our Annual Report – there is tremendous potential for mobile to address some of the key challenges faced by both water and sanitation services, but more evidence is needed to test these innovative models and build the case for their financial sustainability and scale. We look forward to sharing more of this evidence from our grantees in our forthcoming blogs and case studies.
For further information on mobile-enabled water and sanitation services see pages 42-28 of our Annual Report.