Open Data & Water ?

Innovative technologies, mobile-app entrepreneurship and co-production are outputs of the capitalist, globalised economy that spans all sectors and industries. I believe that the application of new digital tools in solving water issues can empower local people, institutions and governments.

In recent years, open data initiatives have been more and more included in development efforts, projects such as Open Data for Development (OD4D) have aimed to spread this innovative approach that fosters multi stakeholder participation (everyone can contribute and access data) and opens up new possibilities for socio-economic development.  

Have you ever thought about how open data can help in raising awareness of water pollution?            

I think that ‘Open Data’ has the potential for a whole new approach to combat water diseases and deal with poor sanitation or droughts. Data on poor water quality could be provided by citizens and made accessible to everyone, which can prevent the consumption of contaminated water. Also, farmers could be connected to vital weather information and better deal with extreme temperatures.

Access to data could be vital in addressing the global water crisis

I find this a very interesting article that makes one see how modern, digital technology and open data networks can have an impact on how people access water in developing countries. A tech start up has developed the ‘mWater’ app, which enables users (individual citizens, different communities..) to analyse water quality and share this information on their global, open-source water monitoring database (Ross, 2016).
For example, this app has been used in the city of Mwanza, Tanzania to generate a dataset of contaminated shallow wells.

“Ninety per cent of shallow wells tend to become dangerously contaminated within a year of their creation. mWater brought that kind of finding to light because we now have monitoring data on massive amounts of water sources across different geographies and over time.”

(Annie Feighery, CEO and co-founder of ‘mWater’)

Surely, there is one very obvious barrier to the success of open data: The precondition of using open data is the possession of a mobile phone and internet connection, but those who might most benefit from open data (e.g. small farmers in remote rural areas) will be those most unable to access it ... 

References:

Ross, Eleonore (2016): „Access to data could be vital in addressing the global water crisis“. The Guardian. 2016.