Chronicle Editor
Vincent Casey Correspondent—
One of the recurring questions I get asked when people learn that I work for WaterAid is, “if people can get access to mobile phones, why can’t they get access to safe water?”It is a jarring image – the village where one house has solar panels resting on a grass roof to provide recharging facilities for the village’s mobiles yet the women still queue for water from the one pump that provides the only source of clean water, or worse head down to the local river – because it disrupts the expected chronology of technological progress.
After all, we have known the vital importance of clean water for over 150 years, and in much of the world it is delivered without the use of cutting-edge technology.
Earlier this year an Afrobarometer survey covering 35 wealthier African countries showed 93 percent of respondents reporting mobile phone coverage in their area but only 63 percent reporting piped water. The availability of piped water is much, much lower in Africa’s poorer areas; UN figures show that only 16 percent of people in sub-Saharan Africa can turn on a tap in their own home.
So why is it is usually easier to get airtime than water to people in many parts of the world?
Water is heavier than airtime
There is a fundamental difference between water and airtime: one cubic metre of water weighs one tonne. One cubic metre of electromagnetic radiation passing through the air as a mobile phone signal weighs nothing.
Water isn’t always available where and when it is needed
A transmitter can generate a mobile signal anywhere, given a suitable source of power, but water operators cannot simply produce water on location. Often, sufficient quantities of water required for a piped supply are not available, and distribution requires pumps, energy, pipework, storage, treatment and a system to fix leaks.
3G doesn’t need pipes
To access mobile phone services, you just need to live within 32km of a base station and have access to a handset. Whilst high quality microwave links don’t come cheap, it is a lot cheaper than laying the thousands of kilometres of fibre optic cable that would otherwise be needed – and, similarly, to lay hundreds of kilometres of pipe to serve remote rural communities. It isn’t much wonder that it is easier to create a network to provide mobile phone coverage than one to provide access to water.
The mobile phone service provider is king
Mobile phone users don’t generally build their own handsets or set up their own networks. So mobile service providers can set up networks confident that they won’t lose their market share to people setting up their own makeshift options. They can lose market share to each other but not to users developing their own options. But those providing clean water don’t have a monopoly over this natural resource.
People can opt to dig their own wells or collect water from rivers or lakes. If a piped water supply costs money, but water from pumps or wells is free, people with meagre incomes will usually chose the latter. This means that the water service provider may struggle to recoup their investment costs and may be put off investing in future.
It is easier for mobile phone
operators to both share and
compete
In the early days of mobile phones, each operator built their own base station. Now operators are increasingly selling their base stations to third party management companies, who keep them working and rent space to different networks. This allows everyone to provide a wider network at a lower cost and opens the market to greater competition, pushing down prices for consumers.
There’s money in them masts
Mobile markets are relatively new territory with exciting investment opportunities, so they have seen an influx of foreign capital to set up the necessary infrastructure. The water sector needs to think about how it can borrow some glitterdust from the mobile operators to better attract funds. – inews.co.uk
What water suppliers can learn from mobile phone operators
No mobile phone operator would construct a base station and then hand over its maintenance to a rural community.
No mobile operator would give customers handsets and then ask them how much they wanted to pay for calls.
No mobile operator would run a continuously bad service with frequent periods of downtime.
Yet all of the above are quite common in the rural water sector. Whilst the logistical challenges of delivering a phone signal and safe water to a population are worlds apart, the water sector can learn lessons from the service delivery and customer service provided by mobile phone operators. – inews.co.uk
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