The project focused on supporting two water utilities near Nairobi in improving their operations. Both utilities differ from each other – the one with many affluent customers and plenty of water available, the other with many informal settlements and a structural lack of water.

However, they both had in common that a lot of water that was being produced ended up not being billed to customers. As a result, they were incurring costs for producing clean water but not recovering these costs from the sales of water.

The project organised for a Customer Identification Survey to be carried out visiting both customers and non-customers. This yielded a very large data set representing the real situation on the ground. This needed to be compared to the ‘known’ situation as present in the existing customer database in order to clean up the customer database.

Benefits for the client:

Within half a year of starting to ‘clean up’ their customer databases, both utilities increased their monthly revenue significantly and consistently.

Chanzo’s tasks included:

• Understand the structure and the use of the currently used customer databases and the problems and limitations experienced by the users
• Understand the capabilities and limitations of the companies (company politics) and relevant employees
• Understand the structure of the datasets as collected during the Customer Identification Survey and how it can be related to the customer databases
• Create automated procedures to compare the two datasets and list the discrepancies
• Interactively develop new or adjust existing working procedures for data management
• Interactively train employees on their tasks related to data management
• Mobilise higher management to see the benefits of investing in cleaning up the customer database and provide feedback on progress made