Digital Africa Water Network (DAWN)

The Digital Africa Water Network (DAWN) will convene African academic expertise, the global mobile industry, Africa's rural water supply network, a new consortium of rural water service providers, and government to create an inclusive network in the co-development of a transformative, digitally enabled programme. We will focus on the development challenges of Smart Communities and digital innovation to advance research and practice on sustainable finance, institutional design and mobile data supported by the University of Oxford.

Reliable access to drinking water for all rural dwellers in Africa will transform the lives of millions of people, with social, economic and health outcomes that extend beyond SDG 6. Digital innovations are already making an impact in Africa in communications, finance, transport, health and energy. Most initiatives have emphasised urban settings. We seek support to create a Digital Africa Water Network (DAWN) that is explicitly focused on digital models that are focussed on? rural areas where over 330 million people lack basic drinking water within 30 minutes of the home (UNICEF/JMP, 2017). With one in four rural waterpoints not working at any one time, compounded by repair times of a month or more, the scale and urgency of the challenge exposes the limits of established models, policy and practice.

Recognising this enduring development challenge, the African Ministerial Council for Water (AMCOW) has identified water security and sustainable finance for water in its strategy for all 55 African countries to 2030. With unique status to support national water ministries identify, test and scale innovative models, DAWN will convene a series of meetings with AMCOW to identify and develop a shared programme of work to establish a future partnership. This will build on AMCOW's collaboration with the Rural Water Supply Network (RWSN) with over 11,000 members from government, practitioners, private sector and academia working to promote 'Sustainable Services' in Africa, and globally.

DAWN will convene leading African academics, and institutes in Mali, Uganda and Zambia, to promote a more inclusive and innovative space for developing digital solutions with local expertise and insights. This will be complemented by GSMA representing the global mobile industry with over 400 members supporting a portfolio of Mobile for Development projects benefiting 58 million people in the areas of health, energy, agriculture, water and sanitation. Rural water has been a gap in this digital innovation space to date.

DAWN is positioned to address this gap through partnership with the Uptime consortium. Convened by the University of Oxford in 2018, Uptime is a new generation of rural water, service delivery models based on a performance-based model working at scale. Uptime delivers professional maintenance services using digital innovations to over one million people in Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Kenya and Uganda today. Uptime's innovative model complements the policy and scale of AMCOW, African academic excellence, GSMA's digital innovation, and RWSN's sector leadership.

Three pathways are envisaged at the African and Global levels:

i) Supporting African Academic Digital Networks
The Malian, Ugandan and Zambian academic leads and institutes have established work and influence in policy and practice on ICT, digital technologies and development. It will be a goal of this first phase to provide support to support their collaboration and partnership priorities. This will be strengthened particularly by access to AMCOW, GSMA and RWSN as well as the Oxford team.

ii) Global Digital Networks
Oxford and GSMA have established programmes of work and networks in digital technologies. These include partnership with the University of Colorado at Boulder (UCB) through the SweetSense work led by Prof. Evan Thomas. This has been funded by GSMA and Oxford is collaborating with Thomas through a USAID grant in Kenya, Ethiopia and Uganda. Oxford has worked in partnership with UNICEF innovation hub in Denmark and through the REACH programme (DFID-funded), Hope and Thomson have worked on a range of digital innovations applied in rural Kenya and Bangladesh. Finally, Oxford has an active digital and ICT community particularly through centres of excellence in Engineering Science and the Oxford's Internet Institute with potentially good links to DAWN.

iii) Future of Water Governance (NEWAVE) PhD programme
Oxford University will host one of fifteen PhD students in an EU programme led by Amsterdam (Vrije) University from 2020-2023. It is proposed Hope's PhD student will work with UDUMA in Mali on Rural Water Finance and by association link with the network of over 20 academic and practitioner partners including leading global water academics, such as Professors Huitema (Vrije), Zwartveen (IHE), Mollinga (SOAS), and Molle (IRD). The launch of NEWAVE will overlap with DAWN and provide opportunities to extend and deepen the academic network.

Economic and Societal Impacts

The Uptime consortium is central to advancing economic and societal impacts for DAWN. With one million, paying rural water users in the four focus countries, Uptime has established societal impacts in terms of dramatically improving the speed of repairs to waterpoints (<3 days vs >30 days) and ensuring they work for more days every year (>90%). The impacts for communities, schools and clinics is significant with ancillary work establishing the need for more digital metrics of these social and economic impacts.

Uptime's disaggregated analysis of the operational working ratios (local revenues/local costs) reveals unique insights into the variation in impacts by technology, institutional arrangement and payment method. Work to understand and improve the conditions under which impacts can be quantified is ongoing but has created significant interest and demand following the launch of the May 2019 working paper.

The Rural Water Finance network event in London will be a key event in bringing a wider constituency of financial and legal actors to evaluate and shape the pathways to scale for how DAWN advances the Uptime consortium with the global reach of RWSN's 11,000 members. This scoping phase will provide an introduction to develop ideas and plans for a proof-of-concept phase.