Digital Africa Water Network (DAWN)

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The Digital Africa Water Network (DAWN) will convene African academic expertise, the global mobile industry, Africa's rural water supply network, a new consortium of rural water service providers, and government to create an inclusive network in the co-development of a transformative, digitally enabled programme. We will focus on the development challenges of Smart Communities and digital innovation to advance research and practice on sustainable finance, institutional design and mobile data supported by the University of Oxford.Reliable access to drinking water for all rural dwellers in Africa will transform the lives of millions of people, with social, economic and health outcomes that extend beyond SDG 6. Digital innovations are already making an impact in Africa in communications, finance, transport, health and energy. Most initiatives have emphasised urban settings. We seek support to create a Digital Africa Water Network (DAWN) that is explicitly focused on digital models that are focussed on? rural areas where over 330 million people lack basic drinking water within 30 minutes of the home (UNICEF/JMP, 2017). With one in four rural waterpoints not working at any one time, compounded by repair times of a month or more, the scale and urgency of the challenge exposes the limits of established models, policy and practice. Recognising this enduring development challenge, the African Ministerial Council for Water (AMCOW) has identified water security and sustainable finance for water in its strategy for all 55 African countries to 2030. With unique status to support national water ministries identify, test and scale innovative models, DAWN will convene a series of meetings with AMCOW to identify and develop a shared programme of work to establish a future partnership. This will build on AMCOW's collaboration with the Rural Water Supply Network (RWSN) with over 11,000 members from government, practitioners, private sector and academia working to promote 'Sustainable Services' in Africa, and globally. DAWN will convene leading African academics, and institutes in Mali, Uganda and Zambia, to promote a more inclusive and innovative space for developing digital solutions with local expertise and insights. This will be complemented by GSMA representing the global mobile industry with over 400 members supporting a portfolio of Mobile for Development projects benefiting 58 million people in the areas of health, energy, agriculture, water and sanitation. Rural water has been a gap in this digital innovation space to date.DAWN is positioned to address this gap through partnership with the Uptime consortium. Convened by the University of Oxford in 2018, Uptime is a new generation of rural water, service delivery models based on a performance-based model working at scale. Uptime delivers professional maintenance services using digital innovations to over one million people in Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Kenya and Uganda today. Uptime's innovative model complements the policy and scale of AMCOW, African academic excellence, GSMA's digital innovation, and RWSN's sector leadership.