John and Anne Feighery, husband and wife team with backgrounds in global health, water, sanitation, and technology, founded mWater, a non-profit tech startup that creates mobile technology to monitor water quality using GPS and cloud-based computing. The startup has secured investments from USAID, WaterAid, and other partners and is currently working in a number of countries including Tanzania, Nigeria, and Mozambique. We sat down with John Feighery to learn more about mWater and the cutting-edge of water quality testing.
What motivated your commitment to testing water quality?
My first career was at NASA, where I managed systems used to test the water and air quality inside spacecraft. There we developed a very simple test for fecal contamination in drinking water that later became the inspiration for mWater’s suite of cheap and simple tests. I had this growing realization that we at NASA were able to provide safe water and sanitation to astronauts in space, yet billions of people still lacked these basic human needs here on Earth. I didn’t want my children to inherit a world with such disparities in basic human dignity, so I left to work in the water sector.
Why is it important to focus on water monitoring and water quality?
This year marks the end of the UN Millennium Development Goal era, which made great strides toward increasing access to a water source. However, we now know that many of these so-called improved water sources are contaminated at levels that are not even safe for bathing, much less drinking. It used to be difficult to perform water quality testing due to the cost of the equipment and the expertise required. But now we have very cheap and reliable methods to perform basic testing. Preliminary estimates show that as many as 2 billion people are drinking contaminated water. We won’t achieve the health benefits related to improved water sources if that water is not also safe.
How accurate is the sampling method?
We support a number of different methods, including a very simple presence/absence test for E. coli that costs less than $5 and does not require special equipment or experience to conduct. We also support more quantitative methods where you actually count the number of bacteria on a plate, and the app even helps with the counting using the onboard camera. Since bacteria such as E. coli are used as indicators of fecal contamination, it is less important to know exact counts unless you are conducting scientific research. Nobody wants even a little fecal contamination in their drinking water. Child mortality and malnutrition related to fecal contamination do not necessarily benefit when you reduce the contamination levels from a lot to a little. For public water supplies that are functioning properly, E. coli should not be present at any level.
How expensive are the sampling and analysis?
Our basic kit, which detects E. coli at the safe drinking and safe bathing levels recommended by the World Health Organization, costs less than $10. The exact cost depends on the quantity and the shipping and customs duty in each country. The design is open source and we publish all the contents on our website, so our users are free to put together their own kits if they like.
What are the logistical challenges of sampling and analysis? And how have you overcome them?
For our partners in Tanzania and other developing countries, the biggest challenges are often transport related. Fuel and vehicles to use in monitoring are very expensive, but mobile technology can help with this. Often providing a cheap smartphone to a trained local person is more cost effective than making repeated trips in a vehicle.
Has the sampling caused fewer people to gain access to drinking water?
We have not heard of any of our partners shutting down a water source due to a negative test result and we would not encourage that unless we know that there are better sources available. Instead we encourage governments and local organizations to use the data to motivate investment in improved water sources or remediation of contaminated ones. For example, our partners in the Public Health Office of Mwanza, Tanzania, decided to shift city policy away from construction of new shallow wells within the city limits based on the data we collected together. This includes a decision to not give permits to NGOs to create shallow wells, instead encouraging them to build a kiosk or borehole.
Which partner country institutions do you work with? How do you work with them?
In Tanzania and Nigeria, we have worked directly with governments and water utilities. In other countries we support the work of our investors who have strong commitments to collaborating with local institutions and government. One of the ways that mWater enables local partnerships is our pricing model: all of our software is completely free for unlimited use. This means that our investors can use money they would have spent anyway on monitoring technology and also create positive social returns by making that same technology available to local organizations without the burden of software fees or consultants.
Have there been any human local capacity limitations? How about laboratory capacity? If so, how have you overcome them?
We find very few human capacity limitations, at least in terms of the ability of people to learn to use the technology and their desire to use it. We design our software to be very easy to use and similar to popular smartphone apps such as Facebook or WhatsApp, which are becoming more and more common in the countries where we work. Laboratory capacity is a big issue in developing countries. Often you will see a very costly piece of equipment that is broken or rarely used. It was probably supplied by a donor or a big project, but now there is no money left for repairs or replacing consumables. We have addressed this by creating a suite of simple, one-time use kits that can capture the most critical water quality parameters without needing any laboratory equipment or special training.
What steps can governments, donors, and other stakeholders take to improve overall water quality?
NGOs and donors should focus on building municipal infrastructure rather than replacing it with their own vertical programming. In urban and peri-urban environments, this means extending pipes and constructing kiosks instead of building wells. In rural areas, this means helping to establish a tax- or fee-based paid infrastructure for managing water systems rather than the tradition of setting up unpaid water committees. Overall, we hear from our utility partners that they want people to stop thinking of water as free. In Nigeria, we conducted a survey with the Progress out of Poverty Index and found a very water stressed district of Ekiti was overwhelmingly college educated and middle class. However, this socioeconomic status was new, shifting within the past generation. The culture of using free water remained. People constructed their own shallow wells and rainwater catchments because they are used to water being free.
Why does mWater work?
mWater provides a model for building infrastructure that does not perpetuate dependency cycles. Using the software market model, mWater does not charge end users, but rather stakeholders. Just as end users don’t pay for software like Facebook or Google docs, mWater identifies investing partners who benefit from the features and charges them. The platform is free to those who need it most and the software budgets of the investing partners become a way of turning over what was once sunk costs into a philanthropic, social investment.
Where will you go with mWater next? How did you choose where to go?
We are guided primarily by our vision to expand access to safe water but are also very responsive to the technology needs of our investors. Much of our existing technology was designed in partnership with our investors who immediately put it to use managing large water programs. Our immediate goals for 2015 are to increase the number of free mWater users by at least 10 fold and to build automated analysis and visualization features so that you can use mWater not just for data collection, but all the way through analysis and presentation of results. We believe that data collection is only helpful if it leads to learning and action. For our in-house projects, we will be using data to create innovative approaches to expanding or improving water services in an equitable, cost-effective, and sustainable manner. We will also work hard to communicate the stories of our free users, who will soon have an amazing set of free tools to share their own innovations.
A. Gambrill
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