Expanding Water Services with Digital Finance

In today’s Hangout, we chat with Rasoul Mikkelsen, Global Manager for Grundfos Lifelink. He discusses how Grundfos leverages a digital payments platform to provide water to underserved communities.

Grundfos is a global market leader in designing and selling water systems and is one of the world’s leading pump manufacturers. Grundfos foresaw the opportunity to use digital finance to make clean water more accessible, and in 2010 launched “Lifelink”, an innovative water distribution system for rural communities that leverages M-PESA. Upon realizing that rural community water projects were often unsustainable due to poor accounting systems, Grundfos conceptualized a pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) model that improves community water management by increasing transparency and reducing the reliance on cash.

"At Grundfos, we are trying to address economic, social and environmental sustainability through Lifelink," Rasoul explained. “The system provides a holistic solution…through a closed payments system where people can use their mobiles to transfer credit to smart cards and then they can use these smart cards to pay for water.”