A first VIA Water project is to start this summer, as the contract has been signed on the 6th of July. A consortium of multiple partners will soon start realising their innovation, that reads drinking water meters accurately by taking a picture with a smart phone and transferring the data to a CRM/billing system. The pilot is implemented in the town of Moamba in the South of Mozambique.

The parties involved are AIAS, which is the authority responsible for small and medium town water supply infra-structure. Collins lda is a private enterprise that executes the AIAS- water provision contract for several towns in Mozambique. MWM is a Dutch company specialized in ICT services, focused on telebased monitoring of water related data, and BOP Inc is a support partner to AIAS and will provide business advice to MWM/Collins. The match between the partners was facilitated by PLAMA, a Mozambican platform for public-private water cooperation.

Mobile Water Management (a TU Delft spinoff) and Collins lda are two young and fast growing companies that are planning to make a difference with innovative technology, optimizing and scaling water services in Africa.  Their idea will enable local companies like Collins lda to cut costs and have a more efficient organization, which means this VIA Water project empowers local entrepreneurs to boost their business and realize long term growth ambitions, making clean drinking water more accessible to lower incomes.

The project will further explore how smartphones can be used as a tool for customer engagement and obtaining customer insights: give insights and trends in the user’s water consumption and enable them to compare their consumption with the average of the neighbourhood. In addition the project will address gender specific consumer interaction, focused on the acceptance of the developed meter reading.

The team is really excited to get started and contribute to the VIA Water program with its combined technical, business and social innovations. For the VIA Water team, it means a first chance of seeing one of the VIA Water ideas come to life, an equally exciting prospect.

For more information, check out https://www.viawater.nl/projects/smart-water-meter-reading.