| dc.description.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sustenance, stalled by outdated infrastructure, rapid urbanisation and climate change.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. | en_US |
