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Pitch

Increasing Efficiency In Clean Water Supply And Usage In Urban And Rural Societies By Making Water Provision An Entrepreneurial Opportunity.


Description

Summary

With poor water provision and water loss increasingly becoming a problem in developing countries. Team STIC have came up with a solution which will incorporate a prepaid water metering and desalination system. The system comes in two instance: A water vending machine (can be with a desalination system) for use in kiosks, water bore holes in rural areas e.t.c., this will enable people to buy water using coins. The second instance is a prepaid water meter for home use which will be provided by water suppliers (private or public) to customers for pre-paid billing of water usage.

This system will give other advantages too: Being if enough intelligent meters are fitted on all pipelines junctions, then the system can give early alerts on water leakage or water theft if the water from water point is not equal the sum of water on all endpoint , hence preventing larger damages and loss.

In General the system will encourage the supply of water by distributing the large work involved in the process of water provision by specific institutes and small number of entrepreneurs to more entrepreneurs, thus ensures sustainable supply of water.

Also it will give people awareness of their water usage and helping the in knowing how to balance the water usage thus making water usage efficiency and reducing un-necessary power consumption that would have been used to pump water and the power used in water purification that is lost on the way or misused (e.g. In Dar-Es-Salaam DAWASA uses pumps to pump water from the river Ruaha through the purification system and then to the supply system).


What actions do you propose?

Government to support areas with no clear water supply to dig bore holes and own or rent one of our system. The support can be economically or even organizational(i.e. leadership on how the community can reach the goal of owning and maintaining their water point).

Prepaid Water Metering And Desalination System will be helping people reduce the misusing of water by avoiding water leakage and making people conscious of water not wasting and give them awareness of not wasting water because they will be trying to utilize the amount of water they have paid for to be enough their usage in a wise way. Making water available by helping water suppliers an easy way of collecting revenue to sustain the service by giving then easy ways to collect money, also reducing amount of emissions that would have occurred if money was to be collected by people involving cars as the system will be billing using mobile money (less emission).


Who will take these actions?

The actors in our Pre-Paid Water Metering System will be local entrepreneurs, COWSO's (Community Owned Water Supply Organisation) in rural areas, and the government water institute (although we plan to target this customer the last).


Where will these actions be taken?

Our Pre-Paid Water Metering System will be used in developing countries, both in rural and urban areas example in Dar-Es-Salaam where currently there are water bore holes in which we succeeded to talk to the owners and they proclaimed that they are having hard time collecting the money from their water points because they can not be on all water points and are having problems with workers not being faithfully. Hence they really required devices to monitor the process.


How much will emissions be reduced or sequestered vs. business as usual levels?

By using the Pre-Paid Water Metering System, energy used to pump water and repair water infrastructure will be reduced by 60% which is very small compared to the emission reduced when people stop misusing resources but it contributes to it. It is one of the steps that will help reduce misuse of resources.


What are other key benefits?

The other benefits of the Pre-Paid Water Metering System is to ensure reliable supply of water in all places as entrepreneurs will take water provision as a business venture hence try to solve the problem. Also the system will ensure reliable availability of water as money will be available for sustaining the business. Using the data accumulated by the system there will be a chance for the entrepreneurs to predict water shortage and prevent the effects.


What are the proposal’s costs?

In Pre-Paid Water metering System, we plan to sell a single unit initially is 500,000 Tsh for the Water Vending Machine without the desalination system (The Carbon Reverse Osmosis) pipes and for the pre-paid home water billing system is now on designing phase. Also we plan to give chance to rent to our customers(water suppliers). For the carbon filters we have got a company AEG(American Engineering Group) that is located in Tanzania which sells at a bit lower price.

NB. The desalination system is an option to include. Also the system is initially designed to work on solar energy, if a customer will not require the solar panels then the system will be sold on 300,000 Tsh.


Time line

For the first 3 years we plan to sell our product in Dar Es Salaam and near-by towns only, this is our phase one. Then in 3-6 years we will sell our product in all regions in Tanzania where there is a need to encourage water supply development.


Related proposals

Saving water with ping-pong balls.beehives1


References

How to reduce carbon footprint.https://www.carbonfund.org/reduce#page

How You Can Help Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions at Homehttp://www.nps.gov/pore/learn/nature/climatechange_action_home.htm

EPA. 14/09/2012 Water And Energy Efficiency.http://www.epa.gov/greenhomes/ConserveWater.htmUSA