Google announced the participants in Google for Startups Accelerator Africa Class 7, with the selected startups set to receive access to mentorship and expert advice over the course of the three-month programme.
Announced in 2017, the Google for Startups Accelerator Africa is a three-month programme connecting early-stage African tech startups with the best of Google’s products, people and advanced technology.
The seventh class includes 15 tech startups from seven African countries, and was selected from thousands of applications, with the final selection based on product stage, programme alignment and market fit.
Water stress has become a subject of global importance as water accounts for a minimum of 11% of family income in the majority of developing countries and the availability still remains a big challenge. Due to unmetered consumption and leakages, almost 50% of the water supplied is lost before it reaches the consumers.
The core of this problem lies in the fact that 90% of the entire water infrastructure is still highly opaque towards consumers as it remains on offline payments and manual metering. That leads to scarce availability to households, unreliable supply, non-payments, high rates, and poor customer service.
The way HydroIQ is solving this problem is by bringing transparency in distribution and access to water by using online and mobile payments, but also data analytics and sensors to build smart water grids.
The digital potential has been present for many years now, but the trick was how to unlock it without compromising customer safety. This is precisely what the app by HydroIQ accomplished with binging full transparency in distribution and access to water across Africa. The first step in avoiding fraud and understanding the trends of global water demand is in making all the water data available, and that is precisely HydroIQ's goal.