Meet Digitaps; A Nigerian Startup That Seeks to Eliminate Water-Borne Diseases With Intelligent Water Systems

If water is life then clean water is clean life!

Water is a fundamental human need. In fact every person on Earth requires at least 20 to 50 liters of clean, safe water a day. As such, the United Nations considers universal access to clean water a basic human right and made it a goal of the SDG.

To make access to clean water difficult is to make survival difficult—water is a fundamental need for sustaining human bodies.
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However, over 1 billion people globally do not have access to clean, safe drinking water. In in sub-Saharan Africa alone, more than half of the population drink water that comes from ‘dangerous’ sources like surface water. This leads to a breakout of major water borne diseases – cholera ,diarrhea, typhoid and lead poisoning.

But all that is changing, thanks to Digitaps.

An IoT to Provide Clean Water

Digitaps is an intelligent water Automated Treatment Machine (ATM) that solves some of the problems of water borne diseases by of providing clean and sustainable water supply in developing countries. With a Turnkey System that is portable and solar-powered, the system takes in water from any source. Using an ultra filtration technique, it purifies the water and makes it healthy for consumption.

https://twitter.com/digitaps/status/1037622155939377152

Founded by a team of entreprenuers led by its CTO, Mr Isaac Imoh, the startup is barely a year old. It is headquartered at AlphaHUB in Kaduna; a hardware innovation centre in which it was incubated and received support.

A single product, Digitap combines four elements essential to smarter water management.

• Filtration:Where unhygienic water is purified for consumption
• Digitap Dispenser-An Automatic and Digital way for clients to fetch water
• Biometrics/ Smart cards -Where water credits are stored and used to access clean water
• Water Management System-where data from transactions and operations are processed and published remotely.

The system uses a solar powered device to inject water into the system for filtration. Users are enrolled using their biometrics. They are issued smart cards to access clean water and can Topup water credit via Mobile money (USSD) or any other electronic means. The Complete System can be Deployed within 6 Hours and has an Install capacity of 10,000 Litres of Water at every given time.

Digitaps does not only Filter water, it also empowers the community by providing and digitalizing the dispensing process. It also provides water data remotely to health centres. Any new virus or bacteria detected by its sensors is flagged and reported electronically to the closest health centres.

With over 1 billion people without access to clean water, Digitap seeks to provide clean and portable water to at least 500 million people in the next 5 years.