CityTaps Prepaid Smart Water Meters
🤖 AI-generated summary of the sources below · 🔎 Last verified
This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.
Smart meters entered Niamey's water offer in 2016: a CityTaps meter on the household connection, topped up by mobile money in any amount, letting SEEN — the Veolia-led lessee of Niger's urban water network — read consumption and cut the flow remotely without sending a meter reader or issuing a bill. Two GSMA grants, a 2015 seed of at least 250 meters and a second in 2018, took it to 1,325 meters covering roughly 2,650 households, and SEEN then ordered 10,000 more. The rollout stopped there. A peer-reviewed field study based on 2022 household surveys found that of the 15,000 meters planned in 2019 only 11% were ever installed, with no growth since, and that 47% of surveyed households named malfunction as their main difficulty — no water at the tap even when the meter was topped up. Then the programme lost every owner it had: Niger's government announced in October 2022 that it would not renew SEEN's lease and handed the network to the state-owned Nigerienne des Eaux, and CityTaps S.A.S. went into compulsory liquidation in April 2025.
📊 Impact
The load-bearing figures come from an independent peer-reviewed field study, not from the vendor. Hassane Younsa Harouna (Mu Kara Sani N deg 40, December 2024), surveying Niamey households in 2022, writes that "sur les 15 000 compteurs prevus en 2019, seulement 11 % ont ete installes soit 1 325" with no growth since, and that "47 % des menages ont declare le dysfonctionnement comme la principale difficulte" — the tap dry despite a credited meter. He puts the cost of going further at "au moins 18 milliards de F CFA" to replace 100,000 meters, a projection of what a citywide rollout would cost rather than money spent. Against that stand the programme's own numbers: GSMA's grantee record gives 1,325 meters, about 2,650 households and 13,250 direct beneficiaries, and CityTaps itself reported on the FinDev Gateway blog in April 2020 that "43% des utilisateurs CTSuite sont devenus utilisateurs de Mobile Money" and that 95% of those already using mobile money transacted more often — vendor-reported and never independently audited. No source published since the handover says whether the 1,325 meters still work.
🎓 Lesson
Prepayment fixed billing for a utility that could not fix supply. The meters did exactly what they were sold to do — collect before delivery, with no meter reader and no bill — and nearly half the surveyed households still called them a malfunction, because a credited balance is worthless when the network is dry. That is the same wall Nairobi's water ATMs hit: the hardware works, the pipes behind it do not. The second lesson is about ownership. Within three years the programme lost its lessee, its vendor and its grant, which is the standing risk of a pilot financed by a startup and a donor rather than out of the utility's own budget.
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📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “CityTaps Prepaid Smart Water Meters” — Niamey, Niger. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/niamey-prepaid-water-meters/ (last verified 2026-08-07). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.