Technology That Makes Huge Impact

A team from the University of Oxford hopes to lift five million people in rural Africa and Asia from water-related poverty by linking smart water-pumps to the cloud. Cortana Intelligence Suite is empowering project partners including UNICEF to monitor the health of water systems at regional scale.

They are using Azure to track groundwater levels in impoverished communities by tracking the data from hand-pumped wells in the region to monitor aquifer health and devise ways to deliver improved well performance across the area. To handle data transmitted by multiple nodes, cloud-based computing is essential. The ease of porting existing frameworks as well as the Machine Learning capabilities of Azure have reduced the time needed to repair a well from 30 days to less than three.