Case Study: University of Oxford achieves scalable water security for rural villages with Microsoft Azure

Intelligent cloud computing lifts villages out of water poverty

Microsoft partnered with the University of Oxford’s REACH initiative to tackle chronic water insecurity in rural Africa and Asia. The challenge was to monitor thousands of hand-pump wells reliably, understand groundwater depth and fluctuations, and scale a system that could inform repairs and investment decisions to break the cycle of poverty caused by unreliable water access.

The team fitted pump handles with accelerometer and gyroscope sensors and used machine learning to infer water depth from pump motion. By using Azure and Azure Machine Learning (with Python and R), researchers accelerated model development and—through an Azure for Research award—scaled the solution to integrate data from tens of thousands of pumps. The cloud-enabled system speeds repairs (from weeks to days), provides actionable data for policymakers via visualization tools, and supports the REACH goal of making millions of people water secure.

University of Oxford

Jacob Katuva

University of Oxford