Two hundred miles from the nearest town, a farmer in Tanzania picks up his phone and notices an alert. Thanks to an app, he’s just found out that the water he uses has tested positive for high levels of a local fertiliser, rendering it unclean. He must look elsewhere for water, or risk making his herd ill.
In a world where only 59% of the population have access to clean water, finding out which bodies of water are unsanitary is vital for those without access to filtration or treated water. In sub-Saharan Africa, the situation is worse – only 16% (pdf) of the population have access to a personal water source like a tap, or a pump in a neighbour’s yard.
Significantly, obtaining clean water isn’t a problem solely confined to less economically developed countries. This year, Flint, in Michigan, suffered from a water contamination crisis when a high amount of lead was found to be present in the drinking water. This happened after the town changed its water source from the more expensive Detroit water and sewerage department, to the Flint river, whose ageing pipes resulted in lead leakage.
It’s not the first US water crisis either. Erin Brockovich, environmental activist, rose to fame in 1993 when she revealed there were dangerously high levels of cancer-causing chromium-6 in a Californian town’s water source. She has continued to fight for greater transparency about water quality, and recently claimed that Hinkley wasn’t an isolated event with more water supplies contaminated across the US. In September, new analysis conducted by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) of federal data from drinking water across the US found the same carcinogenic discovered by Brockovich has contaminated significant bodies of water in all 50 states.
Raising awareness of poor water quality can be challenging, but more organisations are stepping up to the task. Stephen Abbott Pugh, portfolio manager at Open Knowledge International explains how South Africa’s Department for Water is looking for new ways to collect information about water quality and availability during one of the worst droughts in history. “They’re trying to do everything they can to raise awareness of water issues.”
The government is keen to learn how it can deal with crises like drought, or poor sanitation. In April the Department for Water held hackathons across the country which saw 15 hack teams bid to share their solutions to the water crisis by coding apps and debating. The goal according to a statement on their website is “to make data available to citizens for purposes of scrutiny and interrogation and to figure out how the state can best use data provided by citizens.”
Abbott Pugh describes how the use of open data is spreading across Africa, and how it can help combat water disease and sanitation issues. “In Rwanda, organisations are trying to connect a million farmers to data in some way. We need to work out what information we need for this to work and how we can trigger the process. Already open data networks exist where farmers receive messages if there’s a warning they need to be aware of, for example a weather situation.”
One organisation that is succeeding at encouraging disparate communities and individuals to share data is mWater. This not-for-profit tech startup has been making a huge impact on communities since 2011 with its open data initiatives. With 8,000 users in 73 countries, mWater has developed a mobile phone app that allows users to analyse water quality and share this information on their global, open-source water monitoring database.
Studies conducted by the startup found water users tend to choose from an average of three water sources on any given day. They decide where to fetch water based on how it tastes, when it flows best, and whether their friends will be there. mWater wants to make whether it’s contaminated a factor that weighs on their choice.
Annie Feighery, CEO and co-founder of the app, says: “The first public health office we partnered with was in the city of Mwanza, Tanzania. They are very forward thinking and there, every aid organisation that builds a water source (like a shallow well, borehole, kiosk) has to register with them. When they saw our dataset emerge showing shallow wells were dangerously contaminated, even at levels beyond the WHO standard for safe wash water, they made a policy to not certify NGOs building shallow wells any more. Shallow wells are an easy sell in aid.”
There is more to just building a well for village, she says. “Ninety per cent of shallow wells tend to become dangerously contaminated within a year of their creation. mWater brought that kind of finding to light because we now have monitoring data on massive amounts of water sources across different geographies and over time.” She explains the goal is to incentivise monitoring as much as possible; keeping it free also protects against water monitoring turning into a cycle of aid dependency after the donor leaves.
Organisations like WaterAid are using mWater to monitor a water source once it has been created, but other NGOs like the Ugandan Water Project are using the app to conduct a more democratic pre-site assessment. Rather than building a new well somewhere because an important politician lives there, they look at evidence like where water is needed and what is already available to decide where is most deserving.
She explains how mWater was designed with a similar user interface as Facebook and WhatsApp because they’re easy to use. “We routinely train people who have never touched a smartphone in their lives to become proficient app users within a few hours.”
The UN predicts that half the world’s population will live in a water-stressed area by 2030, while EWG research has highlighted how poor water quality is not confined to the developing world.
Open data can be used to give residents a voice, and enable them to choose whether to buy bottled, how to filter their water, or where to lead their cattle to drink. In short, as the global population grows and the world battles with water crisis, we need to open up our data.
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