Water in Sight - product to market

Purpose and goal:

With Vinnovas Step 2 support, Water in Sight achieved its goal of enabling easy, reliable mobile measurements for water and climate resilience. Through their low-tech service, so called Observers who work for authorities in Malawi and Mozambique use SMS and WhatsApp to send manual water and weather observations online, providing essential insights on climate, water, floods, and droughts in Africa, where climate change impacts are severe and only 26% of observations are collected.

Expected results and effects:

Water in Sight´s results: product-problem-fit with users, rapid expansion, 24,000+ water and weather measurements (e.g., Mozambique´s use of Water in Sight´s service is the only digitized record of manual observations for 2023), data collectors performance above WMO standard of 80%, resilience in disasters, database integration, new partnerships, and a novel pricing model. Challenge: selling in a restricted market due to aid-financed, predetermined preferences for physical sensors, thus limiting market potential.

Approach and implementation:

Cooperation with authorities in Malawi and Mozambique was crucial for developing and validating our service. We could thus integrate the innovation as part of authorities´ mandates and processes for data collection. Within Water in Sight, we had a flexible and iterative approach.

We benefited from everyone´s skills and resources, such as developers through our new CTO Daniel Hussam, and Operations Manager Thoko Mtewa´s ability to hire interns through her university. At the same time, membership in SSE Business Lab provided important strategic advice and support.