Pay as you drink

Oxford University DPhil student, Johanna Koelher, talks to the Economist about sustaining rural water services in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Access to a safe and secure water supply is an elusive dream for many in the developing world: in rural Sub-Saharan Africa this is particularly the case. Water infrastructure is often unreliable and poorly maintained, and few have access to a piped water supply. One of the key barriers to addressing this shortfall is a lack of effective financing mechanisms to sustain service provision.

In an Economist article exploring innovations in water financing in Sub-Saharan Africa, Johanna Koehler, DPhil student at Oxford University’s Smith School, shared her experience of Oxford’s water research in rural Kenya. This work, led by Dr Rob Hope, has given rise to FundiFix, a social enterprise which leverages Kenya’s sophisticated mobile payment system and Oxford’s remote pump monitoring, to create a performance-based rural handpump maintenance business.

You can learn more about the FundiFix model here. For an overview of the Oxford University’s smart handpump research click here.

 

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