Case Study: University of Oxford achieves safer water access with Microsoft Corporation’s Intelligent Cloud

Securing safe water through Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud

The University of Oxford, through its REACH initiative, faced the challenge of water insecurity in rural villages across Africa and Asia, where unreliable wells and slow repairs kept communities trapped in poverty. Using Microsoft Azure and Azure Machine Learning, the research team developed sensor-based monitoring and machine learning models to estimate groundwater depth and better understand the health of rural water systems.

Microsoft’s intelligent cloud helped the University of Oxford scale this solution from the lab to real-world deployment, enabling data from thousands of pumps to be collected, integrated, and analyzed more quickly. The result was faster model development, better decision-making, and repairs that could drop from about a month to just a couple of days, supporting the goal of making millions of people water secure.

University of Oxford

Jacob Katuva

University of Oxford