1001 Smart Cities
📡 Data & IoT
🇳🇦 Windhoek

Prepaid Water Metering, Token by Token

Windhoek pioneered prepaid water metering in informal settlements as early as 1998, running over 1,000 communal standpipes. A September 2021 pilot extended it to individual households: residents load a 20-digit code, bought at a vendor, into a battery-powered in-home unit — there is no wireless telemetry or dashboard. The city bought about 300 meters for the first residential phase in 2022, prioritising pensioners and struggling payers.

Live 📅 since 2021

🤖 AI-generated summary of the sources below — how this works · 🔎 Last verified

📡 Data & IoTWater
Scale🧪 Pilot

📖 Terms in this entry: Non-revenue water (NRW)

Sources

↗ City of Windhoek — Finance and Customer (authority)Describes the 20-digit CIU token mechanism, 10-year battery life, and the September 2021 rollout start for individual residential prepaid water meters.
↗ The Namibian — prepaid water meter rollout (press)Confirms the ~300-meter first-phase purchase and targeting of pensioners, defaulting and willing-to-pay customers.
↗ Windhoek Observer — Henties Bay prepaid meter debate (press)Independent confirmation that Windhoek was the pioneer of prepaid water metering in Namibia, beginning in 1998.

This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed above 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.

Continue exploring

Compare this project

🇿🇲 ZESCO Smart Grid Pilot in Roma Township · Lusaka Windhoek's prepaid water tokens need no telemetry at all; Lusaka's ZESCO pilot wires meters for monitoring and tamper detection. 🇨🇴 Prepaid Smart Water Metering (Agua Prepago) · Medellín Windhoek's meters are offline, code-in-a-box; Medellin's card-read meters cut supply automatically once the prepaid balance runs out. 🇮🇶 WASH Smart City Initiative — Al Mansour water-meter pilot · Baghdad Both went non-networked: Windhoek's tokens still work as an access tool; Baghdad's un-networked pilot cut neither consumption nor losses. 🇨🇲 Camwater Smart/Prepaid Water Metering Program · Yaoundé Two African prepaid-water plans: Windhoek's offline tokens have run since 2021; Yaounde is only now tendering a connected version.

Explore the wider context

🗺️ Your City's Problem Map Is Really a Map of Who Complains💧 Water guide🏙️ Windhoek city profile📡 Data & IoT projects
📎 Cite this project

1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Prepaid Water Metering, Token by Token” — Windhoek, Namibia. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/windhoek-smart-metering/ (last verified 2026-08-02). Data: CC BY 4.0.

The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.

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