Cameroon Water Utilities Corporation (Camwater), the public utility in charge of producing, transporting, distributing and marketing drinking water in Cameroonian urban and peri-urban areas, has launched a restricted international tender seeking a technical partner that will deploy smart water meters for its more than 400,000 consumers.

The water utility says the new metering system will first be tested on two sites in Yaoundé and Douala before being implemented in all its intervention areas. The tender is restricted to the consortiums Emerald/Xylem, Catalyst Business Solutions/Isbem Pvt LTD, Cgcoc/Hangzhou Laison Technology Co.LTD, and DAT/Interactive Media Cameroun.

Camwater stressed that the project aligns with the innovations currently being implemented in reading and billing to improve access to drinking water for the population; it is designed to measure the coverage rate, production and distribution yields as well as the quality of reading and billing.

The new system is a response to the current one’s limits which include the “unreliable manual reading of consumption indexes, high reading and billing delays, the difficulty of reading in the absence of customers, and the risk of errors when entering consumption indexes.” These malfunctions lead to multiple complaints from subscribers.

D.M.