Water ATMs: Prepaid Dispensers in Nairobi's Informal Settlements

Nairobi City Water and Sewerage Company, the county-owned utility, put prepaid water dispensers — locally called water ATMs — into informal settlements from 2015. A resident loads a smart card or token at a kiosk or by mobile money, taps the machine and draws metered water straight from the utility network, bypassing the vendors and cartels who resell piped water at a markup. The first four went into Mathare Mashimoni with Grundfos Lifelink, a Danish manufacturer; the utility said in 2018 it intended to roll out 12,000. A separate donor-funded strand installed 16 token dispensers in Korogocho and Kahawa Soweto from November 2015. The machines are run under contract by community youth and women's self-help groups, not by utility staff. What the mechanism did not solve was supply. Peer-reviewed fieldwork in Mathare found the dispensers few and clustered along the main road while homes sat in the valleys below, and their tanks frequently empty: cartels cut the pipes to manufacture shortages and siphoned the dispensers' own tanks, and utility staff conceded in interviews that the machines ran dry. Residents kept buying from vendors, because the cheapest water in the settlement was also the least dependable.

✔ Reviewed by the 1001 Smart Cities editorial desk · 🔎 Last verified 2026-07-26

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