The Problem: The Nairobi City Water and Sewerage Corporation (NCWSC) carries out regular water quality tests at 300 locations within Nairobi – at public waterpoints, treatment plants and boreholes, in formal neighborhoods as well as high-risk informal settlements with open sewerage. Each month, up to 500 samples are taken and tested. This data is of critical importance not only for NCWSC’s management, but also for accountability to the public which consumes NCWSC water. Yet, this data is not directly accessible through a modern interface. This constitutes a major missed opportunity.
The Solution: The proposed application would provide a web-based, geographic interface to access the water quality testing data. Users would be able to go to an (internal or external) webpage (or access the data through purpose built app with a smartphone) and then be able to click on the map to navigate to the testing location of interest. The app would then provide a summary of the latest test results for the selected sample spot (or aggregate area of sample spots), and ideally the possibility to view a timeline for individual variables to view how water quality has developed over time.
The sample points where quality is tested every month, a selection of three monthly quality reports, and a shapefile basemap for Nairobi are availabe for download here.
Nairobi Water utilty managers would obtain an easy overview interface to control the water quality in their network.
If made public on the net, potentially hundreds of thousands of water consumers in the Nairobi city area would be able to research the quality of utility water in their area.
The app should ideally include an easy-to-use upload interface to allow NCWSC staff to feed new data into the system as it becomes available.
The ability to make (moderated) comments and suggestions based on location would be an additional, useful functionality (e.g. for customers to point out leakages, or raise concerns about quality in certain parts of the city).
A functional prototype would first be piloted for internal use for the management of Nairobi City Water and Sewerage Company, before possibly going public.
Comments
I examined the report files
Is it possible to provide the sampling locations in Lat / Long as well as UTM?
For a prototype I was thinking add the coordinates as push-pins to a Google map, however it will not read UTM coordinates.
Making some progress towards
Making some progress towards a deployable prototype. Still need to create an interface for adding new sample data (individually or by monthly report?).
In my work so far I found that many sample locations provided don't have coordinate data, and some locations in the monthly report don't appear in the sampling location file. I think I will create an interface that allows existing data to be manipulated, and new locations entered.
Did you get the UTM to lat /
I need some input from the
I need some input from the NCWSC for some business / logic rules.
To uniquely identifiy a sample location, what is the best course of action
The trade offs are
Similiarly, what uniquely identifies a sample, is it as simple as the LabReference field, or some combination of fields?
My email is available to logged in users here at rhok.org, if I could be contacted directly (feel free to post the answers publicly) so that I can share my plans for prototype deployment and have a point of contact it would be much appreciated.
Kevin