Smart Meters for Safe and Reliable Water Supply

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📊 Did You Know?

In Malawi 🇲🇼, Africa’s one of the poorest countries, 72% of the total population uses at least basic drinking water services as of 2022, according to the WHO database. However, the number drops significantly when focusing on “safely managed” drinking water services — 18% of the total population, and only 10% in rural areas have access. A similar reality has been illustrated in UNICEF Malawi’s report.

📖 The Story

Who, When, and Where — Context

In their 2023 article, the African Union High-Level Panel on Emerging Technologies (APET) showed the positive impact of smart water meters through case studies from Kenya and South Africa.

Why — Challenge

Water scarcity is a major issue on the African continent, and developing piped water infrastructure is crucial for delivering clean water at scale. However, piped water sources pose unique challenges regarding water leakage, inaccurate metering, unpredictable demand, and inconsistent supply. Without addressing these issues, safe water is delivered to those in need in a suboptimal manner, causing other issues such as contamination from a leaking pipe and excess billing due to theft.

What and How — Tech Solution

APET encourages the deployment of smart water meters across the continent. Modernized metering devices can monitor and transmit water usage data from customers to suppliers. These meters ease consumer-supplier communication, improving water management and billing accuracy in the long run. In the City of Cape Town in South Africa, for example, smart meters notify customers about their water usage patterns during droughts. Meanwhile, cities in Kenya use information from the devices to identify and repair water leaks promptly.

💡 Key Insights

• ↔️ One solution to a certain problem can cause other unforeseen problems, like piped water vs. leakage and inaccurate metering.

• 📈 Infrastructure development has no termination state and requires indefinite, repetitive, and long-term investments to keep it up and running.

• 🚰 Hundreds and thousands of edge devices (e.g., smart meters) collectively ensure the visibility of an entire system. Such decentralized, bottom-up approaches can be effective for a large-scale, complex web of physical substances.

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✅ Try This

If you were to record your monthly water usage over the next few months, how would you collect such data and ensure its accuracy? Would you simply trust a water company and read the numbers on the bills? Or is there a smarter way?