UNHCR

The UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency, is charged with providing water to millions of people worldwide, often with daunting logistics. The Ugandan Arua Field effort, where the pilot monitoring program, with Kerlink’s Wirnet Station, was first implemented, provides daily water deliveries to as many as 470,000 refugees. The LoRaWAN-enabled sensors installed at reservoirs starting in January 2019 enabled managers to monitor water levels in real time, providing unprecedented visibility into usage and resource management. They also provided a reliable new source of coordinated payment information for some 630 rental tanker trucks that were hauling up to 6,387 cubic meters (about 1.5 million gallons) of water daily when the emergency response began in 2015. The effectiveness of the monitoring programs in remote locations is prompting expansion to eight additional sites in Uganda, Iraq, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Bangladesh, and officials see a multitude of potential applications for IoT-based wireless sensor networks going forward.