Scaling water services across developing markets requires operators to implement low cost and efficient processes. Meter reading and billing are some of the most critical applications for water operators, as these influence the income of the utility directly. If one could speed-up and increase these incomes, the utility could use the financial means to tackle the Non-Revenue Water (NRW) problem in areas where rationing due to water scarcity is a common practice. Building on the deep insights of different markets, operators that demonstrate high quality of customer relationship management & billing processes tend to have a good payment ratio of their customers. Therefore, this project aims to scale-up the technology of Mobile Water Management from the initial pilot and adds more value to it by including house-to-house surveys, historical datasets and more optical character recognition (OCR) technology as validation tools and assessments of water consumption per customer.

The pilot will take place in an area which is managed by FIPAG. This partner is interested in methods to increase efficiency in metering and billing and wants to explore possibilities of the app as a tool for multiple data acquisition in order to tackle Non Revenue Water problems.

The main goal of the project is to offer a low-cost accurate water meter reading solution (meter reading using an application designed for smartphones), which contributes increased data accuracy and also offers water utilities new insights in their system through different types of data collection. These insights could lead to considerable cost savings in metering/billing, administration procedures and system maintenance. It might also contribute to the empowerment of the sociotechnically less privileged (women).