European Innovation Council grants the Horizon Prize to the UNHCR for IoT based water monitoring system

The European Innovation Council granted the Horizon Prize (€1m) in the field of water, hygiene, and sanitation to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) for creating real-time solutions for the remote monitoring of water tankers to improve the effectiveness of water trucking programming. The system uses a series of networked, ultra-sonic water-level sensors that are installed in the tanks of water delivery trucks as well as static water tanks in refugee settlements to provide real-time data on water deliveries and consumption. The devices send their readings to a central gateway, which can examine data from up to 20,000 individual sensors. The data is fed to an online dashboard that gathers information from all active gateways in a country or region. Then, the accumulation of the data enables real-time monitoring of how much water is being delivered and consumed across the entire country. During the pilot stage of the project, the technology has already been installed in settlements in Iraq, Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, and Kenya, and will be rolled out in Bangladesh by the end of this year.