Maji Milele provides a range of water management services to water utilities to help boost revenue collection and efficiency. The company installs prepaid water meters and online monitoring software which makes it easy to keep track of water distribution, consumption and payments. The company also provides full-service infrastructure maintenance, revenue collection from users and water consumption monitoring, enabling water systems to run indefinitely.

Each year, although governments and donor organisations invest millions of dollars in rural water supply infrastructure in Africa. Much of this infrastructure stops functioning after a few years. In Kenya, about 42% of all small and medium-sized piped systems are non-operational. The main problems are inefficient revenue collection, lack of transparency, poor community management, failure of preventive maintenance and financial mismanagement.

This challenge led AECF to invest US$350,000 supporting Maji Milele’s installation of prepaid water meters at communal water kiosks across rural Kenya. Through this investment, women and children can now reliably access clean, safe water within reach of their local communities. This has reduced the burden of water collection, freeing up time for economically productive activities, school attendance and childcare. In Lodwar, north-western Kenya, women and girls used to travel up to 2.5km to the nearest water point and spend up to six hours queuing – and even then, due to rationing and low supply, the availability of water was never guaranteed. Now, thanks to the construction of water kiosks, located within a kilometre radius of each other, and the installation of prepaid meters, the women and girls of Lodwar can fetch water within reasonable distance.