In March 2012, Water for People (USA) and Akvo (Netherlands) entered an agreement to further develop FLOW, a field-level monitoring tool.
Akvo will lead on product development and support while Water For People will lead in product field-testing and monitoring functionality. The product has been rebranded as Akvo FLOW. The software code supporting Akvo FLOW will be published under an open source AGPL3 license.
FLOW – Field level Operations Watch, brings together handheld data collection with Android mobile phone technology, a web-based dashboard and visual mapping using Google Maps and Google Earth software.
Poor residents in Indonesian cities of Malang (East Java) and Makassar (South Sulawesi) will soon be using their mobile phones to report problems with their water and sanitation services like poor water quality or quantity, well failures, failure of tanker water supplies, and costs for tanker water. This will enable water providers to learn about and quickly respond to customer complaints.
The Pacific Institute has launched the 3-year WASH SMS Project (September 2010 – September 2013) through a three-year pilot funded by USAID Development Grants Program (DGP). The Institute is working with Indonesian partner PATTIRO (experience in Indonesia focused on improving public services, and strengthening government capacity), and technology partner Nexleaf (a leader in mobile phone use to collect environmental data).
With this photo on Facebook local resident Akshay Arora asks the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) to "kindly send some one and get it clean this Toilet/Urinal". One day later on 7 April 2011, MCD replied: "Your complaint reference no. is 02/0704/SP"
The Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) launched its Facebook page in January 2011 and an integrated SMS service in March 2011 to enable public monitoring of garbage collection sites and public urinals/toilets in areas under its jurisdiction.The first experiences were positive as illustrated by the example of 22-year-old Piyush Goyal posted his complaint of garbage spilling over from the dump in his area.
On January 8, he clicked pictures of the seven dirty ones in South Delhi’s R K Puram area and posted them on Facebook. And the next day, he says, he saw the pictures of clean dhalaos uploaded by the MCD.
“There is lot of transparency through this way. The man who actually cleans it asked me why I uploaded the pictures. So the information is going from top to the bottom,” says Goyal.
“This system is increasing transparency, fixing accountability and putting everything under public scrutiny. And none of us like to be ashamed in public. So people have started working at the bottom”.
US NGO Water for People has launched a visual technology called FLOW, Field Level Operations Watch.
Using Android cell phone technology and Google Earth software, FLOW provides anyone on the Internet access to data for projects supported by Water For People. This visual open-source data monitoring database was developed by Gallatin Systems.
Field data about water points or sanitation systems can be collected by community members, project staff etc. with an Android phone and uploaded on to Google Maps and Google Earth. Flow integrates GPS tagging and a photo for each entry. Users can review and edit data right on their Android phone in the field.
FLOW will focus on these key indicators:
Is the water point or sanitation solution being used and functioning?
How many people have access to water and sanitation in the area?
Are the services able to expand with the community?
Is the quantity and quality of water meeting the needs of the community?
Are sufficient tariffs being collected to ensure ongoing operation, maintenance, repair and eventual replacement?
Local data can be merged with other datasets.
For instance, in Malawi, he [Dru Borden of Gallatin Systems], says, UNICEF has already done a survey of all 54,000 water points in the country. You can download that to the phone, and have FLOW give you GPS directions to each site to check up on, pesky missing street signs be damned. If you compress the surveys, they are so small you can fit millions on a microSD card. That means you don’t actually need a data connection everywhere you go–just somewhere to power the phone.
Once you get back to cell service, and upload the data, it runs on Google’s app engine. The data can be stored in the cloud on a variety of services, so FLOW will be essentially free for the average organization to run, once they buy the smartphones. That equipment cost is the catch. Buying the phones is certainly the biggest obstacle to widespread adoption of FLOW, but Borden estimates the unit cost will be about $99 with the release of a cheaper Android handset in Kenya within a year. Right now his firm has been testing it out on Droids and other more expensive models.
