mWater: Mobile Technology for Social Water Monitoring in Low-resource Settings

Purpose

Building on the rapid growth of the mobile phone market in developing countries, mWater’s monitoring system uses an Android app to read its low-cost tests and instantly uploads the results to the cloud, creating a mapped database accessible to the public.

Activities

mWater mobile apps are simple to use and work on and offline, designed specifically for regions with spotty internet service.

mWater follows an open access business model. Anyone can use the platform for free, without a relationship with mWater. Large organizations apply their own software budgets as investments in technology the world needs. Investor-level organizations pay for new features they desire, customized implementations, dashboards, training and support. In turn, we are able to offer all mWater features built for these few partners to the public for free, encouraging more people to monitor WaSH with collaborative mobile data collection tools.

We no longer focus exclusively on water quality tests, but rather broader monitoring and project tracking with our five data collection apps and data management portal (portal.mwater.co). mWater’s flagship app, which received seed funding from DIV, remains our most used app. It maps sites like water points, sanitation facilities, health clinics, schools, and households and monitors them longitudinally with surveys. Other platform features include tickets for resolving issues with sites, assignments for enumerator teams, dashboards for data-based storytelling, and real time reports of data collected. We currently have over 7000 NGOs, governments, communities, and researchers actively using the platform in 59 countries. Collectively, they submit 20,000 surveys per month—a number that is increasing rapidly as we scale. The water data remains our biggest data type, as we have the world’s biggest open access WaSH database. However, we have expanded to include all of water, sanitation, hygiene, and health monitoring.

Countries of activity

Location of main activity

Further information

While we would welcome philanthropy and impact investment, mWater has been 100% revenue based since receiving the DIV.

This project is funded under the USAID DIV scheme.

Filter tags

Global Health and hygiene North America Operation, maintenance and sustainable services Practitioners Private sector, including social enterprises Public awareness, advocacy and civil society engagement Sub-Saharan Africa United States government

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