Ghana reduces water loss through smart metering solution

Ghana Water Company Limited (GWCL) is the country’s national, fully state-owned water supplier. The company is responsible for operating all of Ghana’s 88 urban water supply systems with an average production of 871,496 m3 per day.

The mission of GWCL is to meet the increasing demand for better service delivery. To make this possible, they began investing in a digital metering solution. Due to efficient management of their water production and distribution, the company is now considered a lighthouse among African water utilities.

In Ghana, as well as most of the African continent, non-revenue water is a huge problem. Their distribution networks are not only poorly maintained but also fitted with inaccurate mechanical water meters that are easily exposed to tampering.

As the result, GWCL’s water supply was critically unsustainable with 54% of the water production lost to leakages. Also, because of the need for manual meter readings, the risk of inaccurate billing was very high. All in all, non-revenue water was the biggest problem they had faced in decades, and so to turn things around, they partnered up with Kamstrup to find a solution.

In 2018, GWCL began replacing its mechanical meters with ultrasonic smart meters. Out of their more than 950,000 water meter connections, 112,000 of them have been equipped with Kamstrup smart meters (2024). In just a few years, their new water metering solution has worked wonders – both financially and environmentally.

“From that time we had the engagement to today: 13% drop in non-revenue water, and that is a really, really important milestone,” says Dr. Richard Appiah Otoo. Since they started introducing smart metering technology and pressure management, GWCL’s water loss has now been reduced from 54% to around 40% (2024).

One of the key outputs of the GAMA Sanitation and Water Project was to extend water supply services to low-income communities. One of these was Tetegu, which is located in a flood zone and therefore difficult to travel through when conducting drive-by meter readings. To solve this problem, GWCL attached the meter reading technology to a drone and flew it over the community.

In addition to GWCL’s improvement in non-revenue water, their new smart solution has also provided increased financial revenue through better billing accuracy, considerable energy savings, and more efficient asset management based on monitoring and data. In this way, the financing of the project is based on the increased revenue that the Kamstrup meters are generating.

As GWCL has experienced, it’s difficult to ignore the many advantages of moving from mechanical meters to a digital metering solution. “You do the cost-benefit analysis, and you discover that the Kamstrup meter significantly outweighs any mechanical meter you purchase,” says Dr. Richard Appiah Otoo. “Their R&D (research and development) and the product that they delivered changed how we engineers here used to think about water meter measurements.”