Indicator 16.6.2: Proportion of population satisfied with their last experience of public services

Data Source: Data from water distribution nodes

Summary:

The Egypt Country Office has been mainly working on a project which analyses water usage efficiency over time. They are working on implementing a system that is measuring non-water revenue. The main challenge was non-revenue water as this water shows if water is being efficiently delivered. For this project, they partnered with the National Tele-Communication Regulatory Authority, the Water Distribution Company, the University Port Said, and the University of Suez Canal.

There are four stages to this initiative, in the second phase of the project a lot of big data was collected on the water distribution system. In phase 3 or 4 they intend to focus on the treatment of waste water as well. Generally, the project is very modular in design, which is how they tried to minimize a potential domino effect; one module should not affect the other. 

Generally speaking, the system collects data based on the different nodes in the system (speed of water, water pressure, etc.). These nodes bring this data together and merge it into large data sets. Hence, this data does not yet qualify as big data. 

When they started the project there was no existing data on water usage efficiency in Egypt and the existing data was inaccurate and inconsistent. Therefore, data mining could not be done. Hence, they had to create a system to collect this type of data which proved to be time consuming.

Currently the project works with students who learn about data management, analytics, etc. during this process. After they have completed these courses, they work on this project. This drawback of this approach however, has been that these students come in cycles. Hence, current progress has been slow as they are in a transitional period between different groups of students.

Another challenge was that there was no existing legislature/pre-existing governmental support for this project. This caused a few delays during an early stage of the project.

In terms of results, the system was deployed during the Pilot Implementation Phase and has shown satisfactory results. The system is working well, it is low in power consumption, very mobile, and non-invasive. Currently, they are working towards Phase II of the process which is the data mining phase. Before this stage can be reached, more data nodes will have to be developed.

The project is believed to be the potential start of a good case study of the applicability of data which creates a stepping stone to provide a proof of concept of how such systems can be used to generate meaningful data. Furthermore, the initiative is supporting its partners in gaining valuable technical skills on data and water management.