Starter kit

Clean water and sanitation

Use this starter kit to understand how technology can improve access to clean drinking water, reduce water waste, and protect natural resources. The starter kit provides tools and resources from our experts to help you jump-start your own solution for the 2021 Call for Code Global Challenge.

Make the most of this kit. Accept the challenge and get your free IBM Cloud account. 
Register now
Overview The idea The architecture Resources

Overview 

What is the problem?

Water is the natural resource that is most threatened by climate change and is a prerequisite for life on earth. According to the World Health Organization, 2.2 billion people around the world do not have safely managed drinking water services, 4.2 billion people do not have safely managed sanitation services, and 3 billion people lack basic handwashing facilities. These services are critical in preventing the spread of COVID-19 and other diseases. Even in areas that have these services, there are vast inequalities in the accessibility, availability, and quality of the services. 

How can technology solve the problem?

From intelligent solutions for small farmers to recycling showers, technology can make a significant impact on the availability of water and its consumption.

Special thanks to our partner, Intuit, who contributed to the starter kits and are providing design thinking tools.
Read more

The idea

To encourage optimal water choices by consumers and local governments and to incentivize water sustainability, we propose devising and implementing an API for water data collection and dissemination. With an API, you could have a centralized way to:

  • Query geolocations of sustainable water sources
  • Simplify coordination and funding for water construction projects
  • Explore educational tools to support water sustainability and clean water access
  • Enable transparent water usage, cleanliness results, and site-to-site comparison
  • Access plain language case studies and legislation

We are initially focusing on the development of a starter kit that will enable these channels to be developed to their fullest potential.

Explore all the solution ideas

The architecture

Embedded architectural diagram
  1. The user or community leader accesses a Clean Water Insights Dashboard.
  2. The insights dashboard requests the Clean Water API for data that the user wants (including queries made on a chatbot).
  3. The user can converse with a chatbot to get necessary information, and the insights dashboard can act as an orchestration application for the chatbot.
  4. The Clean Water API component retrieves the required data from various sources and aggregates them as necessary.
  5. A machine learning module uses the data sources as a corpus to build a recommendation model and hosts that model.
  6. The Clean Water Insights Dashboard can get recommendation and prediction information from a recommendation engine.

Resources 

Kit producers

Our creators of this starter kit along with their bios:

Next steps

See more starter kits

Zero hunger

Responsible production and green consumption