In its attempts to clamp down on illegal connections and recover unpaid bills, Nairobi Water and Sewerage Company (NWSC) has contracted the services Geomaps Africa, a consultancy firm on Geometics and Geo-Information solutions, to collect customer information.

Geomaps will, in the next two months, collect information on meter location, and their individual serial numbers to establish whether the meter is being used for domestic or commercial services.

This information will then be fed to NWSC data base and be used to generate maps covering NWSC entire grid. The maps will then be used to monitor water use and how customers will be billed.

The water firm says that this system will help reduce the increased number of unpaid water bills.

As posted on Business Daily, NWSC Managing Director, Phiilip Gichuki said, “ Through mapping of our supply area, our officials can determine which accounts are overdue and by how much and immediately dispatch a team to the customer’s exact location for disconnection,”

According to the Business Daily, NWSC has spent more than KES 6 million in disconnections aimed at recovering outstanding debts and helps bring down deficit in collections. Through the exercise, the water firm managed to get more than 5,000 new customers who had previously managed to evade water bills.

“Through this new service we will be able to recover areas with illegal connections by comparing the volume of water supplied through our bulk maters and what us later recorded as spent by the area’s customers. Any considered deviation between these two amounts immediately raises the red flag about an area where water diversion is most likely taking place.” added Gichuka.

As posted in the Business Daily, NWSC plans to scale up the technology in their water meters to enable remote transmission of meter readings to their main database through General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) – enabled devices. This will be similar to what Kenya Power uses.