Project start: 2022
Partner: Water Compass
Countries: Uganda
The project aims to provide families in villages with drinking water in their households. As there is no public water supply, the project significantly contributes to health and hygiene in the affected regions.
To this end, the project is building its own water supply infrastructure. The running costs are to be financed by income from the sale of water.
The administrative process is largely automated so the villagers can manage it independently and without additional support. Simple and inexpensive STS prepaid water meters with PIN pads are used for this purpose.
STS (Standard Transfer Specification) is an international, manufacturer-independent standard for prepaid electricity and water meters that work with credit tokens. A 16-digit token is entered into the meter, which then dispenses a corresponding amount of water or electricity.
To make the process simple and secure, water sales are handled exclusively electronically using a common mobile payment method. The revenue is collected in a joint management account.
To this end, the iSAtech PayU-Cloud was set up as a central payment and administration system.
The consumer is registered in the system with their water meter by a contact person in the village.
The consumer sends a mobile payment to the shared credit account. The iSAtech PayU-Cloud registers and allocates this payment to the respective consumer. The system then creates a credit token for the consumer’s water meter and sends them an SMS with this token. The consumer enters the token on the PIN pad of their meter and receives clean drinking water.
The system is designed to be user-friendly so the villagers can use it without extensive instruction or training. In addition, statistical evaluations provide a quick overview of the quantities of water used and possible water losses.
Project cornerstones:
- Project for water distribution with cost-effective STS domestic water meters
- Automatic recording of payments by evaluating instant payment notification SMS
- No complex and costly system integration with a payment provider necessary
- Automatic generation of verified STS credit tokens
- All STS-compliant electricity and water meters can be used
- Automatic delivery of tokens via SMS
- Simple management of the system using a tablet in the village