New mobile citizens and waterpoint sustainability in rural Africa

Africa's innovation in mobile technology may form a key platform to resolve one of its oldest problems - safe and reliable water access. The idea of this research project is that a systemic informational impasse has been a fundamental constraint to rural water supply sustainability. Two recent innovations in mobile communications technology have released this constraint: first, a secure, universal and low-cost information and mobile money system that allows an increasing majority of rural and urban Africans to talk and send money at increasingly lower costs, and second, the pilot development by Oxford University of a data transmitter that can automatically, accurately and securely transmit low-cost data on handpump water use. With a regular, reliable and universal flow of handpump data no longer will governments and donors be able to claim investments have worked based on unverifiable data. Accountable and transparent information will be available for everyone in instant and simple metrics of how much water is available when, where and, critically, over time. When handpumps fail, everyone will know and new ways to provide better maintenance services by sharing risk across multiple handpumps will be possible. Donors and governments will no longer be able to hide and citizens will be to act with the power of information. As rural Africans remain the hardest to reach and most in need of safe water access globally, the potential developmental impacts of this research, under increasingly unpredictable climates, could result in transformational impacts across time-savings, health, education, income, gender equity and basic human dignity for the 330 million Africans without safe water access.

By 2012 more Africans will have access to mobile communication services than improved water services. By 2014, 90% of Africa will have mobile communication coverage. These very recent changes in combination with a real appetite to address the majority of one billion Africans struggling in rural areas under increasingly unpredictable climates offers a concrete opportunity for meaningful and lasting change. Chronic failure and under-performance of rural waterpoints (handpumps) is central to rural poverty. Lack of improved water services leads to daily and life-cycle costs for most Africans, but particularly women and girls; for example, in rural Africa an estimated 40 billion hours is spent annually collecting water from unsafe sources, mainly by women and girls, with an associated 448 million lost school days each year and a related 1.5 million deaths in children under five years from drinking unsafe water. Despite significant efforts and billions of dollars of investment between 1990 and 2008, 67 million more rural Africans now lack safe water access, a statistic symptomatic of Africa's faltering progress towards meeting the water access global safe water target twenty years late in 2035.

With one in two rural Africans owning a mobile handset and government, donors and mobile operators actively seeking new collaborations and ideas, this project aims to harness this swell of technology innovation and policy support to test at scale an innovative new device designed and piloted by Oxford University. The technology alone has little value but it is transformative potential to capture and share data from remote and dispersed regions seamlessly and instanteously opens up new and exciting possibilities for change. No longer may living in rural Africa be synonymous with being chronically poor and water insecure. This project aims to challenge and change this situation to maintain and accelerate safe water supplies for rural Africans.

Who will benefit?
The primary beneficiaries will be a) rural water users in Zambia, b) the Government of Zambia, c) donors/investors. First, rural water users will benefit directly from a free, one-year maintenance service pilot reaching an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 water users served by 200 sampled handpumps in rural Zambia. Second, the Government of Zambia and Ministry of Local Government and Housing (MLGH) responsible for national rural water supply will benefit from capturing and understanding data on the performance of handpumps in real-time to i) shape planning and investment decisions to reach the most in need in an accountable and transparent way, ii) have empirical data on operational performance and costs to develop a national rural water maintenance programme, iii) be in a position to monitor and hold to account donor investments in handpumps over the life-time of pumps, iv) crowd-in investment from potential investors who are underwhelmed by the lack of metrics on investment returns compared to other interventions (i.e. health, education), v) be in position to maintain and accelerate improved water services to Zambia's 8.3 million rural inhabitants, of which 4.4 million lack safe water supply. Third, donors/investors will benefit by understanding the performance of their investment in rural water supply and be able to monitor and target investments of the full life-time of a handpump learning how and who uses the handpump to improve effectiveness and ancillary interventions, such as maintenance services, water quality testing, hygiene education and water supply to rural schools. Naturally, if the project achieves its goals this work will have potentially dramatic implications across all rural areas in developing regions where 84% of the 884 million people without safe water access live. UNICEF is uniquely placed to effectively scale-up and leverage change across the 193 countries where they operate.

How will they benefit?
As discussed in detail elsewhere, the time-savings, health, education, income and dignity benefits for rural water users will be large and significant. Equally, the distributional impacts will particularly favour women and children, and other vulnerable groups, such as the elderly, single-female headed households and child-headed households. The latter are a particular concern due to the impact of HIV/AIDS in rural Zambia.

The opportunity to benefit?
The pathways to impact document answers this question, though it can be re-emphasized that working with MLGH and UNICEF positions the project centrally with key policy and donor decision-makers in the rural water sector in Zambia and globally. Further, the project will invite other known NGOs working in the sector to learn from the project though we have a clear purpose to work with government and not outside it for sustainability and impact. In addition, the project has an ongoing dialogue with Airtel and other major mobile network operators to support other mechanisms to communicate and catalyse this work in Zambia and beyond.