smart taps

New Year’s Eve 2022 we began selling water to residents in Karuma for 25 shillings per jerry can. That’s about half a penny for 5 gallons of clean water. And the response has been overwhelming.

“This is the first clean water we’ve ever had,” one subscriber told us with a smile on her face.

“Your water is so cheap it’s basically free,” another subscriber said, shaking his head in amazement.

How did we do this?

Through smart taps.

A smart tap is a water spigot that only dispenses water to subscribers. Subscribers sign up with us, receive a token, and we load water credits onto their battery-less token as they pay. They can then collect our clean water from any smart tap in town, as little as 1 liter at a time, by putting their token up to the smart tap; it automatically begins dispensing water and deducting credits from their token until they remove the token from the machine. The barrier to understanding how the system works is minimal, and our local staff have had no trouble explaining it to subscribers. The small screen on the smart tap displays only numbers and symbols, so literacy isn’t a barrier either. This is a truly robust and ingenious system.

With the revenue generated from selling water in this way, we will eventually be able to maintain the water infrastructure, keep the water clean, and pay our local staff salaries entirely on locally generated revenue. And the more subscribers we have, the more we can grow our infrastructure to reach more parts of the community. Eventually we hope to expand to other villages.

Within the first month of turning on our initial two taps, we had over 600 people sign up to use our clean water, and more are signing up daily We’ve also been able to use that revenue to subsidize a free water allowance to a neighboring primary school that has about 200 children. For years the children there were drinking swamp water and getting diarrheal illnesses, but now they drink our clean water. And by purchasing water from us, community residents are the ones paying for the childrens’ “free water.” The community is beginning to support itself, which for us is a dream come true.

going forward

As we continue to increase the coverage of our water distribution by adding more smart taps in Karuma, we’ll increase revenue and be able to cover more of our fixed costs. These are the next water points we hope to install. The Water Distribution Center is where our borehole is located, and it’s where we’ve located the pilot water point. The circles are the anticipated coverage area of each water point based on community feedback.

For now we’re only servicing the small area around the water distribution center, but as soon as we have the funds secured, we’re ready to pull the trigger and set up water points for the rest of Karuma. Eventually we can become fully self-sustaining. And as we’ve often said, if this model works in Karuma, a difficult town of exceptional poverty and crime, it can work in any town.