Water and Sanitation Corporation (hereinafter, called WASAC) and Japan International Cooperation Agency (hereinafter, called JICA) are coducting the project for strengthening operation and maintenance of Rural Water Supply Systems in Rwanda (hereinafter, called RWASOM) since 2015. RWASOM mainly supports 4 model districts - Rwamagana, Kayonza, Ngoma and Kirehe at the Eastern Province in Rwanda. The project conducts developments of manual and capacity building of WASAC, Districts and Private Operators.


Currently, most of countries focus SDGs to achieve 100% water access by 2030. Because of that, it is very necessary to collect and analyse the GIS inventory data for water supply management, especially planning and improvement of operation and maintenance.


Now WASAC has started to map all of water facilities data in rural area under support of RWASOM since July 2018. Then, we also started to use collected data by offline since Feb 2019.


We spent the minimum budget to conduct our mapping and data sharing without customizing FOSS4G so much. This our approaches might be very useful for other users in developing countries. So we would like to share our experience and approach of FOSS4G in Rwanda.

Narok Water and Sewerage Services Company (hereinafter, called NARWASSCO) supplies water at Narok town and Ololulung'a town in Kenya. As of February 2019,we have 4,689 water connections and 74,314m3 of water consumption in Narok, also have 580 water connections and 5,736m3 of water consumption in Ololulung'a. Total length of pipeline is 144.2km in Narok and 71.7km in Ololulung'a.


NARWASSCO, currently uses FOSS4G to do data collection and data utilization for water supply services. For example, mapping of all water facilities in the company, and the collected data have been used to improve operations (application of new connection, leakage management, meter reading, customer care, etc.). We can say Narok water is the first water company which started to use FOSS4G in Kenya.


Our interesting is how water company use GIS inventory data to reduce Non-Revenue Water (NRW). NRW means physical losses(leakage) and commercial losses(meter reading error, illegal connection, etc.). We think GIS technology can contribute a lot of things for water supply services, so we would like to share our experience and get some idea from participants of FOSS4G conference.