ANALYSING THE ADOPTION OF A DIGITAL APPROACH FOR NON-REVENUE WATER MANAGEMENT IN AFRICAN WATER UTILITIES: A CASE STUDY FOR BURKINA FASO, MALAWI AND ETHIOPIA WATER UTILITIES

Abstract

Non-Revenue Water (NRW) remains a great threat to African water utility operations and sustenance, stalled by outdated infrastructure, rapid urbanisation and climate change. As such, this study investigated NRW management in three African water utilities: ONEA in Burkina Faso, Wolaita Sodo Water in Ethiopia and Lilongwe Water Board in Malawi, with NRW levels of 19.3% in 2018, 35.4% in 2024 and 42% in 2021 respectively. The research aimed to analyse the adoption of digital approaches for NRW management by identifying key operational challenges through literature reviews and questionnaires and specifically examining the impact of operational activities on NRW levels and exploring the potential of digital solutions for effective NRW management. The reviewed literature indicated main operational activities (technical management, customer management, financial management and institutional management) as the major factors influencing NRW levels in the utilities. Other factors affecting the NRW management are the overarching factors (leadership, management strategy, culture and governance) and the enabling environment (regulation, sector policy, institutional arrangement and legislation). The findings highlight significant gaps in teams in place, technical capacity building for staff and the deployment of technologies such as SCADA systems and proactive leak detection and repairs for NRW management. Benchmarking of African water utilities with utilities in other regions like Europe (Denmark) demonstrated the effectiveness of digital solutions and regulatory measures in NRW reduction as NRW was less than 10%. The recommendations include adopting proactive leak detection, data management analytics, network management and advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) as strategic approaches for African water utilities. Additionally, developing a digital model is proposed for utility benchmarking to facilitate tactical decision-making and intervention to manage NRW in water utilities.