Technology With Purpose: Building the Backbone of eWater’s Global Clean Water Network
Bespoke Software Development / Hardware & IoT Integration / Systems Architecture
- 4,000+ Smart taps deployed and monitored
- 4 Countries served across Africa
- 10+ Years of live operation since 2015
We were delighted with the support we had from the Digital Trading team. They really understood the product and what we needed to do, and worked hard to make that a reality using their expertise in connecting hardware to the Internet of Things.
Rob Hygate
eWater
The Challenge
Clean water infrastructure without oversight fails.
Access to clean, reliable water remains one of the most pressing challenges facing communities in the developing world. Charities and organisations have long worked to install taps and wells in rural villages — but infrastructure without oversight fails. Taps break down, go unrepaired, and communities are left without safe water, sometimes for weeks.
eWater set out to change that. Their vision was to use Internet of Things (IoT) technology to create smart taps capable of tracking water usage, detecting faults in real time, and automatically triggering an engineer response the moment something went wrong. The hardware concept was there. What was missing was the software intelligence to bring it to life — a system capable of collecting, processing, and acting on data from taps deployed across remote, rural areas of Africa with little to no reliable internet connection.
Building that system was not a straightforward task.
The Solution
A complete operational platform, built for the field.
Digital Trading designed and built the complete backend platform that powers eWater’s global operation — connecting smart tap hardware to a comprehensive dashboard system used by eWater staff and engineers in the field.
The platform handles everything from usage tracking and fault detection to engineer job assignment and resolution. When a tap reports a problem, the system identifies it, raises a job, and assigns a local eWater-trained engineer to respond — keeping communities supplied with safe water and minimising downtime.
Beyond operational management, the platform generates detailed usage and error reports, tracks water volumes distributed, manages payments, and includes a fundraising marketplace allowing individuals and organisations to invest directly in water systems for specific villages.
The entire system was engineered to operate reliably in the challenging conditions of rural Africa — hot, dusty environments with intermittent connectivity — where failure is not an inconvenience but a risk to human health.
The Result
4,000 taps. 4 countries. A decade of clean water.
Since 2015, the platform has supported the deployment of over 4,000 smart taps across four countries, keeping communities supplied with clean, monitored water — and giving eWater the operational visibility to respond quickly when something goes wrong.
What began as an idea to connect hardware to the internet has become a fully functioning global operation: engineers are dispatched, faults are resolved, water is tracked, and communities across rural Africa have a reliable source they can depend on.
- Complete backend platform built to connect IoT smart tap hardware to a live operations dashboard
- Real-time fault detection with automatic engineer job assignment to minimise community downtime
- Operational across 4 countries with over 4,000 taps monitored since 2015
- Built to perform reliably in remote environments with limited internet connectivity
- Fundraising marketplace integrated, enabling direct investment in village water systems
Technologies:
- IoT
- .net
- c#
- AWS