Handpump Data Improves Water Access
With two-thirds of the world’s population facing water scarcity at some point during a year, and with one-third of handpumps in rural Africa inoperable at any time, increasing the reliability and functionality of water services is essential to sustainable development. The Smart Handpump Project, initiated at the University of Oxford, is improving water services in rural Kenya through sensors installed on handpumps in the region. Pairing realtime data from these sensors with a performance-based maintenance service model reduced the average time to repair a broken pump from 27 days to three days. Now continued under a social enterprise called FundiFix, which uses an insurance-based funding model, the concept expanded to a second county in Kenya and recently to Bangladesh. The Smart Handpump Project illustrates how new information flows from innovative sensor data can improve key services. Such low-cost and scalable data interventions strengthen the governance and management of resources critical to sustainable development.
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