On Thursday 13th of October, 2011, 32 developers, water experts and other interested stakeholders met at the CcHub in Lagos to brainstorm technology tools to develop at WaterHackathon Lagos to address some of the issues in Nigeria's water sector.

The brainstorm was preceded by a presentation on the Overview of Water Sector Development in Nigeria by Professor Lekan Oyebande - Professor of Hydrology (University of Lagos) and Chair of the Technical Committee of the West Africa Water Partnership.

After the presentation and an extensive Question & Answer session, the group defined possible tools that could be created to address the different challenges with water in Nigeria. The tools suggested so far are:

• Water delivery measurement systems - software monitoring the amount of water delivered to houses
• Water locator - tool to find the nearest sources of water based on location
• Water census - a tool to determine how much water in Nigeria is govt provided and how much is self sourced and location
• Mobile tool to crowdsource and track burst pipes and sources of leakages across our water distribution system
• Mobile games to educate Nigerians on use of water
• Mobile application to send alerts on bad drainages that are likely to contribute to flooding
• Sensors that can be tracked to show quality of water at different parts of the network. This would be an early warning system for contaminants
• Programme to recycle water with government support
• Water policing - mobile system for naming and shaming companies whose packaging clog drainages the most
• Mobile system to facilitate sharing of water sources for people with boreholes

More tools can still be suggested during the opening session of WaterHackathon Lagos starting on Friday 21st of October 2011 at 9am. You can also join the teams setup to build these tools by signing up to join WaterHackathon Lagos here

You can view pictures of the meetup here