Mobile payment innovations improve water service delivery in Tanzania

New research from Oxford University has found that mobile payments and related innovations are improving urban water service provision in East Africa by increasing revenue collection and reducing corruption.

Water service providers in Tanzania often struggle to provide satisfactory water supplies in its rapidly growing cities due to inadequate revenue collection and inefficient billing and payment systems. Mobile payment innovations are being used to improve public service delivery in East Africa by increasing the ease of payment for customers, expanding revenue collection for water utilities, and removing opportunities for theft, bribery, and collusion.

The project examined the use of mobile money applications and wireless pay point networks for water bill payments in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Data included 1,000,000 water payments made using different payment methods, 1097 surveys of water users in the city, and over 40 interviews with water sector officials and representatives with the telecommunications industry.

Researchers on the project include Aaron Krolikowski (School of Geography and the Environment), Professor Xiaolan Fu (Department of International Development), and Dr. Robert Hope (School of Geography and the Environment). Funding was provided by the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship.

The report, entitled “Wireless Water: Improving Urban Water Provision Through Mobile Finance Innovations” is accompanied by a policy brief and three analytical sub-reports on customer payment behaviours, governance, and user characteristics, which can be downloaded below.

Read the Oxford University press release

Report: Wireless Water: Improving Urban Water Provision Through Mobile Finance Innovations
Policy Brief: Improving Public Service Delivery with Mobile Payment Solutions
Analytical Perspectives: Mobile Payment Innovations and User Characteristics
Analytical Perspectives: Analytical Perspectives – Governance
Analytical Perspectives: Mobile Payment Innovations and Customer Payment Behaviours

Smart Handpumps feature at the Department for International Development on World Water Day

Today Oxford University’s Dr. Rob Hope presents research on Smart Handpump technology at the UK Department for International Development, as part of their celebrations for World Water Day 2013.

The seminar A Life (in a Day) of a Girl will consider how water impacts on the life of a girl, from her birth, to school, adolescence, through to adulthood. Experts from the Department for International Development (DFID), universities and NGOs will discuss key issues such as early childhood development, childhood undernutrition, menstrual hygiene, reproductive health, the burden of water collection, and technology.

The Smart Handpumps project is led by Oxford’s School of Geography and the Environment. The technology consists of a GSM-enabled transmitter, securely located within the handle of the pump. The transmitter is programmed to send periodic SMS messages detailing pump usage which are transmitted cheaply and automatically over the GSM network.

Immediate detection of handpump failure can help ensure that repairs are made quickly and open-access data can improve the monitoring and regulation of water service delivery. Mobile networks allow for the scaled-up management of multiple handpumps, thereby reducing operational and financial costs.

Field trials in rural Kenya have been running since August 2012 and are being expanded with support from DFID and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). The interdisciplinary project team is made up of Geographers, Engineers, Economists and Public Health experts from a number of departments across the University. Other partners include the Government of Kenya, UNICEF, GSMA and Rural Focus Ltd. (Kenya).

 

View the Smart Handpumps poster

Watch the Smart Handpumps video

Read more about the Smart Handpumps project

Economic Rights and Regulatory Regimes: is there still a ‘right’ to water?

On Tuesday 19 March, a workshop at Oxford University gathered 55 participants from the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), the Environment Agency, the National Farmers’ Union, water companies, along with academic experts to discuss the right to water in the light of increasing regulatory intervention.

 

The event was convened by Dr. Bettina Lange, Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, Oxford University and Dr. Mark Shepheard, McGill University, in association with the Foundation of Law, Justice and Society and Wolfson College.

The workshop’s theme was inspired by increasing concerns about water scarcity issues in the face of pressures from climate change and reforms to the abstraction licensing system currently being discussed for England and Wales.

The first panel, which invited speakers to ‘rethink’ water rights through stewardship, was opened by Professor Karen Morrow from Swansea University who provided an extensive overview of the common law applicable to water regulation. Morrow highlighted the links that water regulation has not only with property law but also with administrative environmental and human rights law. She introduced the new and more radical approach of granting rights to nature to protect water resources. Dr. Bettina Lange and Dr. Mark Shepheard shared their findings from empirical socio-legal research which mapped how farmers think about a right to water and identified key factors that shape such conceptions.

Henry Leveson-Gower, Head of Defra’s Future Water Resource Management Project, opened the second panel which explored the use of market mechanisms for promoting water stewardship. He explained the need for a reform of the current water abstraction licensing system, highlighting that the current system is not flexible enough to respond to alternating floods and droughts due to climate change. Leveson-Gower urged the need for more efficient use of water resources and outlined three economic incentive-based options currently being considered by the government. 

Alice Piure, Strategy & Policy Analyst at Anglian Water, presented interesting findings from a research project that explored the use of various types of water trading and their contribution to promoting water stewardship. Finally, Jon Stern from City University London discussed market-based approaches to dealing with periodic water scarcity, in particular the sale of raw water from one region to another.

The third panel offered academic perspectives on state regulatory approaches to water stewardship. Donald McGillivray of Sussex University gave a historical overview of the approach taken by the common law to regulate water stewardship. He argued that the current regulation gives mixed legal messages about water rights and sustainability as there is no real clarity regarding the regulatory goals.

Prof. Bill Howarth of Kent University pointed to the significant advances that have been made in regulation to anticipate and manage the risks of unpredictable events such as floods or droughts, but argued that much more must be done to effectively enhance ‘water security’.  Dr. Sarah Hendry from Dundee University closed the session with some contrasting insights from Scottish water regulation.

The final panel involved a round-table discussion regarding the future research agenda in water stewardship. Various themes were raised, including the challenge of reconciling potentially different competing regulatory goals, specifically ‘water security’ and ‘food security’, as well as challenges to and opportunities for developing cross-disciplinary perspectives on water stewardship.

By Sebastián Castro, DPhil Student, Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, Faculty of Law, University of Oxford.

View workshop presentations and podcasts

More severe and widespread UK droughts expected with climate change

UK droughts are projected to be more severe and affect larger areas of the country over the next 100 years, according to a new study by Muhammad Rahiz and Prof. Mark New published in the journal Water Resources Management.

The team made a detailed analysis of regional climate data from the Met Office’s Hadley Centre to investigate future drought trends. “Both drought intensity and the spatial extent of droughts in the UK are projected by these climate models to increase into the future”, said Professor Mark New, Professor of Climate Science at the School of Geography and Environment and co-author of the study.

The findings of the study could have implications for the way water is managed, particularly in the South East, one of the most vulnerable regions. “If you have small, localised droughts, that’s not so important from a water management point of view, because most utilities can move water in from another place,” said Professor New. “But if a drought affects a whole region like the South East of England, then you’ve got a more significant problem.”

Read the full article on the Natural Environment Research Council website

Reference

Rahiz, M. and New, M. (2013) 21st Century drought scenarios for the UK. Water Resources Management, 27(4): 1039-1061.

Open innovation in the water sector

Professor Carolyn Roberts, Director of the Environmental Sustainability Knowledge Transfer Network, calls for major shifts in the way we think about water and wastewater. She writes about open innovation and the principles of collaboration for water management in the Water and Sewerage Journal.

Roberts notes that a recent surge of interest in innovation in the water sector is an encouraging sign. The impetus for change comes from emerging pressures such as the Water Framework Directive, carbon reduction targets and growing concerns about sustainability. Water companies are starting to rethink their approaches but Roberts suggests that a fundamental paradigm shift may be needed.

“Government backing and open innovation principles of collaboration and partnerships have underpinned the changes in the waste sector, but despite the rhetoric, a steer clear for water management is yet to emerge” she writes.

Progress is being seen in some areas, such as leakage control and anaerobic digestion for treating waste. But imagination is limited, says Roberts, and planning for cities where water, energy and waste sytems are monitored and managed together is far from the norm.

According to Roberts, the solution must be like an orchestra creating great music. The various and overlapping sectors, such as water, energy and land management, along with the cross-cutting themes of resource efficiency and carbon management, need to be managed collaboratively and creatively to produce a harmonious whole.

Read the full article in Issue 1 / 2003 of Water and Sewerage

Find out more about the Environmental Sustainability Knowledge Transfer Network’s Sustainable Water Management Group