From Needs to Services: Delivering Personalized Water Assurance Services in Urban Africa

Abstract

With rapid urbanization, a changing climate and increasingly strained centralized water systems, individuals and businesses across urban sub-Saharan Africa face unreliable water supplies, escalating water costs and health risks (e.g., from poor sanitation facilities or slow adoption of new practices). These deficiencies and risks are unevenly distributed over space and time. In some cases, low-income households may spend up to 20 percent of monthly income on water while others in the same geography may never see water prices that exceed one percent of household income. Several web/mobile applications have been launched in an attempt to address these deficiencies and risks. However, these applications are generally designed in a top-down manner and consequently fail to deliver personalized services. Furthermore, in many developing countries, these applications follow the develop-and-deploy paradigm. This implies that the end-user’s needs and goals are often neglected prior to the actual development of the system. This paper presents part of our ongoing work to model, analyze and develop personalized water services using goal-oriented requirements engineering techniques. We focus on conceptual modeling in order to identify the requirements needed to design a system for personalized water assurance services. Our modeling and analysis follows a bottom-up approach that starts from interactive engagement with the water ecosystem to the use of goal-oriented approaches for the analysis and design of requirements for personalization.