Stop job losses. Catch thieves. eBilling (& eFiling) for small town water. An application with both NGO and commercial potential - H2O-PEN!
NEW Youtube Intro: http://bit.ly/pAAgSO
FEMI IS LOSING HER JOB!
Was she lazy? No. Did she steal? No.
Femi lives in a small town in Uganda. She works long hours in a supermarket, rarely taking home more than $3 USD a day. Her husband works far away in Kampala but Femi is lucky enough to share a house with her two sisters. Sharing three rooms among ten of them is sometimes a bit tiring but at least Femi has water in her house.
Abdoul, the local water provider, serving Femi’s small town of 4 000 people – is also a small businessman. He recently won, via tender, a contract from the government to run the town’s water system. He recently connected up Femi and her sisters to the water mains.
Until recently Abdoul he was a pump repairman. He’s happy running the scheme as it was recently repaired with funds from the German government – the income is more stable (so far!) than repairing pumps, and he has to travel less, making his wife happy.
So what is the problem?
The problem is Femi is about to lose her job. We know she didn’t steal, we know she is not lazy. So what happened?
<SCROLL DOWN TO USER STORIES TO SEE MORE>
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The summary behind the story ...
A simple mobile-2-web system could save people (think Femi) time and hassle and money by allowing them to pay their bill using their mobile phone. It will make water supply in small towns, simpler, cheaper and easier. And those costs could even be used to give (some) water free to the poor.
The same system can provide technical and financial performance of hundreds or thousands of schemes to outsiders -government officials, regulators, donors, NGOs and non-profits. (Think Sam, whose story is to come). This makes donors more inclined to put in money.
This way outsiders can figure out when to intervene and when to leave well alone, who is cheating, who is doing well, who needs a new pump.
Without it taking months and cutting off people from the water in the middle of the dry season.
It can also provide a simple way to give feedback and advice to those running the schemes (think Abdoul) feedback they understand and can work with. Real-time advice on performance.
In the future such a system can even be linked to a simple way for users to give feedback on their mobile phones, strengthening the incentives for managers and government to do a good job.
According to the World Bank, UN, OECD and others "the bulk of urban population growth for the foreseeable future will take place in far smaller cities and towns" - i.e. not in already large and mega-cities.
So this is a big problem (and a big 'market'). Click here for some photos of similar types of water networks and the (indicative) issues that we are trying to solve: http://bit.ly/nItBDc
This is the sort of system we are trying to assist:
Click for video here for some context
and here for one page on the exact sort of town we are talking about
http://bit.ly/njNRfg The boomtown of Hai BomaN'gombe, Tanzania
Other places where this would assist are, for instance:
- The 150 operators, many of them supported by the World Bank, in Uganda.
- Operators throughout Kenya and Tanzania – click link for a profile of one in Kenya and one in Tanzania <to come>
- The operators of schemes throughout Nigeria, where small towns number in their thousands.
- The 300 small town operators, many of them young graduates, who’ve invested in their own scheme in Morocco.
- The 50 aguateros, famous in the water sector, in Paraguay.
- The existing and future operators – private, public or community in the tens of thousands of small towns rapidly growing in Africa.
<Links to these & other sources to come>
Femi is losing her job ....
Why is that? She was forced to take three days off work recently on short notice. And no, it was not because her sister was sick. It was because she had to pay her water bill!
The problem is in Tangala (* not the town's real name, nor are the names!) – where Femi lives – that people still have to pay their bill by hand – or their water gets cut off. To do this they must:
- Take time off work and queue to pick up the bill. The day Femi went, the printer was broken and it took all day.
- She then had to queue all morning the next day to get the cash from the bank to pay the bill.
- The she had to queue again (!) at the water company (run by Abdoul) just to pay the bill. The printer was still broken so they were slow in dealing with her and she missed more work.
Can you help to avoid this happening again?
Surely there is another way? M-Pesa recently came to Uganda and Femi uses it to pay a bunch of things. But not her water bill. If Abdoul had a system that logged each of his clients, accepted the meter readings he does and spat out a bill – which could be sent to Femi’s mobile phone – then already we’d be winning.
If she could then avoid the bank and all the queuing (using M-Pesa) or other, then we would really be winning.
The other problem .... is that Sam thinks Abdoul is cheating.
He cannot be sure, because he is drowning in paperwork, and it is slow in coming in from the 250 small water companies that Sam oversees (some run by real professionals, some by semi-professionals and some by organised community groups). For Sam sits in the Ministry and is in charge of two things. He regulates these small systems (to check the price is fair, no-one is cheating, bills are being paid all sides). And he channels new money into schemes that honestly need the help.
The problem is Sam has nothing to go on.
Piles of paper are the records from these schemes – ink-stained, rained on, ripped and torn. He has a new laptop (those kindly Germans again) but nothing to put in it. He needs data and a way to compare one scheme with another. To see who is getting better over time, who is getting worse and which one of his operators appears to have dropped dead.
Can you help?
After all, what would this take?
The same information Abdoul uses to bill Femi could be sent to Sam at HQ. Abdoul could also be asked to send him readings from the borehole meter. Sam can then see how much water Abdoul sucks out of the ground, how much he treats and how much he sells. Discrepancies would be obvious – and Sam would know about them fast.
Fast enough to get a repairman there if Abdoul is not cheating (and his pump is merely broken).
Fast enough to make sure that Femi and the other million Ugandans (and maybe 100 million Africans) living in such contexts continue to get water out of small town taps and small town handpumps.
Even better, imagine if Femi could just send Sam an SMS to say she thinks Abdoul is cheating too. Now, with that he could really call the police and do ‘some regulating’.
That’s what he signed up for - not for piles of paper!
Help us get rid of this >>
Customer cellphones will be basic. People like Femi won't like spending money to complain.
So please use SMS but USSD preferred.
Could be that neither operators (Abdoul) nor regulators (Sam) have a lot of technical skill or knowledge - so their interface should be relatively straightforward.
Especially if there is performance feedback to operators (e.g. Sam). Symbols could be good here.
What is needed is a basic system that does this:
- Allows Abdoul (the manager) to give Femi (the customer) a bill via cellphone and have her pay, for preference, by M-Pesa.
Beyond that, it would be good to:
- Collate financial data from tens or hundreds of schemes to Sam (the regulator).
'Nice to haves' would be:
- A system that can also collect technical data (water pumped, water treated, water billed) and send this on.
- A system that allows direct complaints from Femi (the customer) to Sam (the regulator)
- A way of manipulating information (e.g. water sold per month, losses between water pumped and water sold) and sending it back to the operator.
SIMILAR PROJECTS
There are a few - problems already posted e.g. Kenyan customer feedback mechanism.
Here is a scenario and a sample billing accounts spreadsheet for Tangala, for Abdoul's system
The sort of scheme Abdoul runs - some technical data on which you will find here - looks quite like the one you find at this link. This is pretty representative of the scenario (operator, compexity of scheme, mix of household and household connections) that we are looking at.
http://www.wsup.com/sharing/documents/TB002_NaivashaBusinessModel_v2.pdf
RESOURCES
There is an open source API for M-Pesa system in Kenya. See:
http://www.moseskemibaro.com/2011/05/25/m-pesapi-an-open-source-api-for-safaricoms-m-pesa-in-kenya/
May be similar things for Uganda - and the system you develop is as likely to be used in Kenya as Uganda - so if you find nothing Uganda specific - by all means use that. Meanwhile MTN-Uganda do have a mobile payment system - see here http://www.gemalto.com/php/pr_view.php?id=591 Unsure if there is an api for this.
Comments
We (ODD) work on supporting
We (ODD) work on supporting small entrepreneurs in sanitation - so it will be interesting to see what developments there are on the water side and whether the sanitation sector can benefit from some offshoots from progress here.
The idea of being able to pay with your mobile phone clearly fits the African context - where after all these systems first were created.
So is an African solution to an African problem feasible here! We shall be keeping a close eye on it!
Hi David. You were telling me
GPOBA in Uganda. Hi David. You were telling me that there was a World Bank programme (was it the Global Partnership for Output Based Aid?) that has been spending a lot of money on small towns in Uganda. I think it was this group that said they are very interested in such mechanisms because of the transparency they bring, no? Thanks ....
GPOBA & World Bank
Kampala Hackathon has teams
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