Access to water is essential to contain the spread of COVID-19. This crisis emphasizes once again the importance of having utilities providing us all with safe water and sanitation in a sustainable manner.

Measures to prevent Coronavirus in cities, informal settlements or slums are being taken. Water utilities around the world are working hard and supporting their peers in an act of global solidarity.

This is the case of Waternet and Société Malienne de Gestion de l'eau Potable (SOMAGEP). The first, from The Netherlands; the latter, from Mali.

Many water utilities all over the world struggle to update their customer database and face enormous challenges with unregistered, unbilled or illegal customers, feeding the commercial Non-Revenue Water.

The WaterWorX partner City of Bulawayo (Zimbabwe’s second largest city) requested Mr. Sjoerd Rijpkema, from the Dutch Vitens, to develop a script to link data from customers in the customer database (BIQ) to all individual properties, captured in the cadastral map of Bulawayo.