EWATERPAY AT THE UK AFRICA INVESTMENT SUMMIT 2020
By Founder and CEO, Alison Wedgwood.
Walking around the UK Africa Summit earlier this week, I was struck by the fantastic surge of optimism and energy of all the businesses and organisations taking part. In the vast hall of the O2 arena exhibition stands from Governments of Ghana, Senegal, Rwanda and many others jostled for space with the UK’s Department for International Trade, Azuri Technology, Vodafone and Standard Bank. The atmosphere was so different from the usual worthy aid conferences I have attended when workshop after workshop explain about how hopeless things are. This time there is a real sense that innovation, IT, entrepreneurship and home grown talent from Africa will lead the way and transform business, creating new markets and shaming the UK with our prevailingly low productivity and growth rates. There is much we can learn from the African “can-do” spirit, people are tired of the aid mentality now.
Hats off to the Department for International Trade (DIT) for running the UK Africa Investment Summit, as I was able to meet senior people from various countries interested in water infrastructure and technology. Showing off eWaterPay’s live analytics dashboard on my iPad, people were excited as they saw the litres of water dispensed and the sales for that water kept increasing as consumers use the eWaterPay system. Being able to harness technology in our business is key ensuring stakeholders are able to see the impact eWaterPay’s water management system can offer. Whether it was Philip from the Rwandan Development Board or Sheila from the Ugandan Investment Authority they could not believe that it was possible to interrogate our data all the way down to one eWaterPay dispenser in an incredibly remote village in northern Tanzania. eWaterPay pride ourselves on being able to offer a service that allows people to watch live water purchases from the hardest to reach people on the planet, in any given location viahttps://app.ewaterpay.com .
eWaterPay’s pre-payment, solar powered, IOT water meter is ready to scale in 2020. In the last year we have organically made clean water accessible to 67,301 people and we are forecasting 300,000 people in the next few months only because we are invested in Africa. eWaterPay believes in training and employing the best local people to run operations. This includes managing the eWaterPay credit financial ecosystem providing sustainability to water infrastructure, negotiating contracts with Mobile Network Operators to integrate mobile money into eWaterPay for the purchase of water credit, maintaining water meters, solar systems and pumps and recruiting more skilled local people to run operations in Tanzania, Ghana and Gambia for further expansion.
eWaterPay has built strong UK-Africa partnerships and hope to continue driving impactful investments through the support of the British government and UK/African businesses. With requests for eWaterPay expand into new markets, such as Mali, Uganda, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Senegal, we cannot expand fast enough in our mission to be the water service provider using technology to disrupt the existing model by supplying sustainable water to the bottom billion.