dloHaiti and Safe Water Network meet in New York

The VIA Water project for the scaling of mobile IT for Safe Water Enterprises (SWE) was officially kicked-off this past month. The project proposal was between three SWE operators (dloHaiti, Jibu, and Safe Water Network) to collaborate, build and integrate an open source platform for mobile IT, or as we have come to refer to it-a system for emerging markets analytics (SEMA)
s
The groups stated objective is serve 200 million people by 2030. That goal will only be achieved with sector-wide cost reduction and efficiencies. The SEMA project is the first step to facilitate shared common technical and business solutions. The shared SEMA platform will also help accelerate the adoption by more SWEs and encourage new entrants into the sector. Before any of the SEMA platform is built however, the SWEs needed to take on a collaborate assessment of current operations between the three companies.

The goal of the assessment was to understand current operations, find mobile IT needs and opportunities for common platforms among the three companies. The companies made official introductions of the teams to familiarize themselves, project goals and schedules were discussed and then each group did a deep dive into the ground operations and mobile IT capabilities. Jim Chu (dloHaiti) and Dan Nolan (UNTAPPED) flew out to New York, to the office of Safe Water Network to have a full-day discussion and assessment.

The assessment presented several common operational struggles and needs between the SWEs, in areas from water operations, to financial management, to customer resource management. The next objective is to take the full-range assessment and use the information to create the baseline data architecture. The common data architecture from the APIs, to the data schemas will be combined and designed to finally have the first shared open-source platform for SWEs.