SDG 6 calls for universal access to clean drinking water, but beneficiaries are little involved in the process even where government infrastructure expands, and a lack of accountability and transparency obstructs progress.
We hypothesize that frequent water quality monitoring can help low-income women navigate difficult water collection and treatment decisions and hold local officials accountable for the lack of progress. However, conventional monitoring programs are expensive, government-operated, conducted rarely and mostly outside households, and yield data seldom shared with communities.
We developed a community-based water monitoring tool that integrates a mobile app with existing and novel low-cost, mobile sensor technologies, and tested its performance when used by local women with minimal training in field sites in Tanzania and India.