File photo shows volunteers clean up a section of river Kirichwa Kibwa during the World Water Day celebration in Nairobi, capital of Kenya, March 22, 2017. (Xinhua/Allan Mutiso)
NAIROBI, Nov. 27 (Xinhua) -- Kenya and Chinese technology firm Huawei plan to partner to monitor water quality in order to boost access to clean water, officials said on Monday.
Fred Nyongesa, water quality manager of Water Resource Authority (WRA), told Xinhua in Nairobi that they are in discussions to sign an agreement with Huawei to begin monitoring water quality in early 2019.
"Under the agreement Huawei will install telemetric systems to relay water quality data to WRA database on a real time basis to check for disease causing organisms as well as to enhance the safety of aquatic ecology," Nyongesa said during the Sustainable Blue Economy Conference currently under way in Nairobi, Kenya.
Nyongesa said that once the system is in place, it will enable government to track water polluters on a real time basis using remote sensing.
He added that currently 60 percent of all surface water in urban areas and 40 percent of all water bodies in rural areas are polluted.
Nyongesa revealed that contamination of water bodies is largely due to illegal discharge of solid and liquid waste into rivers, lakes and streams.
WRA is currently conducting a survey on the country's six water catchments areas to assess and classify their levels of pollution.
Prateek Bhatt, a channel solution manager at Huawei, said that the water monitoring system is currently working in China.
Bhatt said that its water quality monitoring system works through sensors that are installed at strategic locations to gather data which is stored at private and public cloud.
"We have developed a communication platform that is robust enough to extract valuable data according to how it is configured," he said.
