Remote Monitoring of Solar Water Pumps: GHI and USAID Pioneer Innovative Pumpview System
On 31st July 2023, Green Habitat, with support from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), launched a new solution for remote monitoring of solar water pumps, called the Pumpview. The solution comes against the backdrop of several challenges that affect the sustained access to potable water, especially in rural communities. Several interventions to improve access to water supply in rural communities fail due to a lack of proper monitoring and maintenance of the water supply facility. Reliable and affordable means of monitoring the functionality of boreholes to troubleshoot them effectively and reduce downtime have been a challenge for years now.
Whenever a pump is down, it takes a long and arduous process to get it back to functionality. These reports highlight the depth of failed intervention investment trends, which can only be reversed through the development and implementation of sustainability measures for every water infrastructure intervention project. Since 2016, researchers in the water sector have tried to develop remote monitoring systems for water pumps. Today, several products are in the market, but in practice, they are limited by several challenges, including high price points and cost of maintenance and service fees.
Overall, there is a huge gap between taking ownership (communities taking responsibility for their facilities) and access to technical services to manage and repair them. In addition, government agencies tasked with the responsibility of managing water facilities suffer from poor funding, logistics and tools. In light of the highlighted challenges, GHI, with support and funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), developed an affordable and reliable remote monitoring system that leverages Internet-of-Things to track and monitor the functionality of water facilities, thereby triggering an on-demand water operations and maintenance service.
The Pumpview is an Internet-ofThings (IoT) and GIS-based enabled solution that monitors and reports the functionality of water pumps located in remote and hard-to-reach communities of Nigeria, via a website accessible from any part of the world.
Following the testing and deployment of the Pumpview solution, GHI established a monitoring station at Kebbi and Sokoto State RUWASSA offices. In addition, GHI trained their officers on how to use the Pumpview platform to track and monitor borehole facilities. The two government agencies noted that with the remote monitoring system, their planning and logistical operations have been significantly optimized. They are now able to observe the functionality of facilities from their offices with the need to only dispatch a local agent to a faulty facility as the need arises. Since the solution was deployed, the response to broken boreholes has increased, reducing the downtime of water pumps.
