The challenge
South Africa's municipal water crisis is, in large part, a visibility crisis. Non-revenue water runs around 47% nationally — and well past 50% in some metros — meaning nearly half the water a municipality treats and pumps earns no revenue, lost to leaks, illegal connections and faulty meters. With a national infrastructure backlog estimated in the hundreds of billions of rand and a fraction of that funded each year, no municipality can dig up the whole network. The problem isn't only ageing pipes; it's that no one can see where the water actually goes after it leaves the reservoir.
The core problem: you can't fix, bill or prioritise what you can't measure. With scarce budget and crews, blanket pipe replacement is impossible — the only affordable path is to find the worst losses first and spend there.
Our approach
- Meter the zones, not every household. Establish district metering areas (DMAs) and meter the inflows — a contained, low-cost way to map losses fast (the method in our NRW guide).
- Rank by minimum night flow. At 2–4am, legitimate demand is near zero; whatever still flows into a zone is mostly leakage — so the worst zones reveal themselves.
- Manage pressure. Reduce excess pressure (especially the night peak) to cut background leakage and bursts across whole zones at once (see pressure management).
- Fix the worst, then prove it. Target crews at the highest-loss zone, regularise illegal connections, and re-measure to demonstrate recovery.
- Built for the network. Low-power and solar sensing reaches remote reservoirs, and edge buffering keeps the night-flow record through load shedding — on the addaNet platform.