Delivering Clean Water Using Less Carbon: The Success of eWATERservices’ Smart Taps

 

We’re kicking off the week with an inspiring story from Isle’s longest running programme, the Climate Change Trial Reservoir. This initiative supports innovative water transition technologies to combat climate change. One standout success from 2022 was the Smart Taps trial by eWATERservices, which brought 24/7 access to affordable, clean water to two rural communities in The Gambia using solar-powered technology. Today, we’re excited to dive into this fantastic project and catch up with eWATERservices Founder and CEO Alison Wedgwood to learn about her journey and the project’s progress since the trial.

Smart Taps: A solution to a global problem

With over 844 million people worldwide lacking clean water, the need for solutions like Smart Taps is critical. In rural communities, including the villages of Wellingaraba and Ndemban, women and girls often shoulder the burden of fetching river water, which they then typically purify using diesel fuel. This not only keeps them from work and school but also contributes to carbon emissions and reduces local air quality.

Transforming communities with solar-powered innovation

Thanks to loan funding from Isle’s Climate Change Trial Reservoir, eWATERservices installed three Smart Taps in Wellingaraba and Ndemban. The goal was to provide 1000L of clean drinking water per tap each day during the spring/summer 2022 trial. The trial was fantastic, with an average of 1400L of fresh, clean drinking water delivered daily to 1500 residents. This success has dramatically improved life in these villages, Outcomes allowing women and girls more time for work and school and ensuring proper hygiene during menstruation — a significant step towards their full participation in daily life every month.

Reducing emissions, improving lives

The solar-powered Smart Taps also made a substantial impact on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Each liter of water delivered cut emissions by 0.42kg CO2 equivalent, leading to an estimated annual decrease of 52 tons CO2 equivalent from water collection and purification processes.

Now, let’s take a closer look at this remarkable journey. We had the pleasure of sitting down with Alison Wedgwood, the visionary Founder and CEO of eWATERservices. Alison shares her experiences, the challenges faced, and the fantastic progress since the Smart Taps trial. Get ready for an inspiring conversation about innovation, community impact, and the future of clean water solutions!

ISLE: Hi Alison, thanks so much for talking to us today. Let’s go back to the beginning. How did you find out about the Trial Reservoir and what made you think it was right for eWATERservices?

AW: eWATERservices was established in 2015, so it’s been up and running for some time. I think we were introduced by Isle Utilities, and at that point, we were trying to prove the Smart Taps model, so the Trial Reservoir was a perfect fit. I loved the Trial Reservoir because it was super, super quick and efficient. Funding became available and so we could launch a trial very quickly.

ISLE: Can you tell us about what you found to be the most valuable part of the trial?

AW: It was the simplicity of it! It wasn’t laborious. It ran along the lines of “We [Isle] have a reservoir of cash, you can use it as loan funding for something that’s going to make your project run along quicker, and we’ll sort out the rest”. For someone in a business like ours you cannot underestimate the value of that. All the form filling and bureaucracy [which is usually required to secure funding] creates huge friction and cost to a business. So the Trial Reservoir was really unique in the fact that it was simple and helped us access credit easily.

Isle: Besides proving the model, did your trial have any specific technology focuses you can tell me about?

AW: We were trialing extensions and new bits of technology for the Smart Taps. We found that people were charging up their eWATER Smart Tag [a smart token to hold water credit] but there was no electronic display so they couldn’t actually see how much credit they had. So we wanted to let people check their credit by tapping their tag on the tap. We had to make quite a few technical changes during the trial to improve power and efficiency and to make sure it was all working, readable, and didn’t overheat. And we came up with a much improved version of Smart Taps as a result of the trial.

ISLE: How have things gone since then?

AW: SmartTaps have gone from strength to strength since the Trial Reservoir. Smart Taps are now completely integrated into Wellingaraba and Ndemban, and the availability of clean water has meant the village is growing, the school population is growing. There’s a very big secondary school [in Wellingaraba] where we installed a Smart Tap. They have their own tank and taps around the school which are free for the pupils and that school is really thriving. And overall there are more people visiting the market, more businesses and more small entrepreneurs. It’s been hugely successful, so much so that we’re having to expand even more!

ISLE: What a fantastic result! What’s next on the horizon?

AW: The exciting news is that we’ve now expanded into Kenya. This is a new programme we launched early in 2024, and it’s taken a year to get established. We’ve followed the Gambian model, where eWATERservices provides a 24/7 access to clean water guarantee. We have a public-private partnership with the three county water authorities and their Governors and senior members of their County executive committees to provide water for the next decade. This gives us real institutional legitimacy operating an unusual long term private model rather than the traditional aid model.

ISLE: How exciting! Can you tell us what’s different about the eWATERservices model?

AW: The difference between eWATERservices and NGOs [that take a community based approach to water] is that we feel quite strongly there should be a price paid for water. It makes the business sustainable, it means we can scale up, and we believe we can and should stay put and manage the system, instead of handing things over to a community or water authority and moving on. We don’t want to go back to the villages in two years and see a broken water system.  

The second very important difference is that eWATERservices sticks around for a minimum of 10 years and helps with design, installation and then maintenance and repairs.  Currently NGOs and donors might install a system in collaboration with the local community and county, and then they hand over the water system to the community for them to maintain it.  The empirical evidence suggests that this approach has failed – every village in Africa has a broken water system because looking after rural water systems is quite hard to do, lots of things break all the time and need money and expertise to fix.

What’s tragic for me is that fewer people in Sub-Saharan Africa have access to clean water now than 10 years ago. It is a crisis — you know there is something wrong when every single village in Africa has a broken system. But fixing it doesn’t cost that much! Providing clean, safe water [via Smart Taps] is around $50 per head, or $6-8 per person per year. That’s less than 3% of someone’s income, even for the low users, but it’s enough to cover maintenance, chlorine, the inverter — everything.

To do it right you need to treat the citizens as your customers, with respect, and provide a service rather than try to create a nice aid narrative that people in a village in the Gambia or Kenya are somehow different from people living in a village in Surrey or Staffordshire. I don’t want to look after my water system here, I want to get on with my life!

Supporting water transition technologies in the real world

eWATERservices’ Smart Taps is one of many successful trials supported by the Climate Change Trial Reservoir. This initiative is all about helping water transition technologies that combat climate change by reducing greenhouse gasses. We focus on de-risking full-scale trials of advanced technologies (TRL 8-9) in real world settings. The idea is straightforward and user-friendly: if a trial doesn’t succeed, it’s free; if it hits the pre-agreed KPIs, the user buys the technology, and the tech company repays the loan. 

Interested in learning more or getting involved? Get in touch with us at [email protected] or follow the Trial Reservoir on LinkedIn.