Residents of Katitika village in Kitui who had to fetch water from far away now have a nearby water point known as, maji ya kompiuta, or ‘computerised water’. Collaboration between Safaricom, Grundfos, a division of the Danish pump maker Grundfos Group, and the Katitika Self Help Group made this happen. Telecommunications operator Safaricom’s M-PESA enables already 8.8 million subscribers in Kenya to send and receive money through their mobile phones. It also contributes to entirely new applications that can leverage this mobile payment system, such as this one.

All members of the Katitika group use electronic cards, which have to be loaded using the M-PESA service on their mobiles with at least Sh100. When in need of water, a resident points the card to the card reader, which triggers the pump to deliver water while deducting the three Kenyan shillings per 20 litre automatically. Once funds are exhausted, the client reloads it again. Read the full story in the Daily Nation of December 2009.

The water pump company is changing its business model, writes Nathan Eagle in the great book SMS Uprising: Mobile phone activism in Africa. They move away from hardware sales to sell what he calls water ‘vending machines’.

Source: 1. SMS Uprising: Mobile phone activism in Africa, Fahamu Books, 12 Feb 2010 2. Daily Nation, 16 Dec 200

Tags: africa, financing, information and communication, technology, water supply