Do It and Prove It - Information Technology Opens Up the Water Sector

January 10, 2011
By Brett Walton, Circle of Blue

Pressed by the need to provide clean drinking water for nearly 900 million people, a new generation of innovators is creating technology tools and an information economy that will transform water supply accountability and empower customers to demand better service from their water providers.

Among the most popular and effective new tools are mobile phones and mapping technologies that rely on rising access to wireless Internet connections and cloud computing to facilitate the flow of information. These devices, along with the software to link them together, show which supply projects are functioning and when water will be available to customers. By deploying this and other new technologies—including data monitoring and water quality testing—water advocates and service organizations are taking a serious look at project outcomes in order to learn from their failures.

The newly developed practices are replacing procedures that became global standards—build a water pump, add a new connection to a city’s trunk line, and hope that service reaches those who need it.

Yet, tracking whether these projects held up in the long run was less important than accumulating assets—or donors—on the construction side of the balance sheet. Quite often, failure was the result, as the uncounted mass of broken water projects and dissatisfied public service customers in the developing world would attest.

Tapan Parikh, a professor in the information school at the University of California-Berkeley, divides the sector’s information economy in two:

Tools focused on improving the performance of governments, water aid groups, and other institutional actors.
Tools providing information directly to customers regarding services that affect them.

“Institutions, like non-governmental organizations, can become more accountable, connect with their constituents and monitor their projects with better information,” Parikh said in an interview with Circle of Blue. “At the same time, the individuals we are trying to reach with these products aren’t well connected, either socially or through traditional infrastructure. Information technology can mitigate this isolation.”

A number of organizations and businesses are developing tools catering to both sides.

NextDrop, a start-up company formed by graduate students at UC-Berkeley, is attempting to use data gathered from cell phone users to predict when water will be available in cities with intermittent supplies.
Water for People, an NGO, is using data-tracking technology from Google to show, in real-time, how its water supply projects are performing.
The H2.O Initiative, a group of water aid organizations, is highlighting a bundle of water monitoring and evaluation tools.

What do you think?