CaliAqua

CaliAqua App promotes citizen science and water quality, by features to report alterations in water bodies, and buy drinking water with discounts thanks to: A quarterly plan for water distributors.

Problem: Drinking contaminated water due to Water Scarcity

Situation in Chile:

• 50% of the country's municipalities have been under water scarcity decrees by the beginning of 2022
• In 2019, Chile was positioned as the first country in Latin America with "high water stress", this condition is spread from Atacama to Los Lagos
• In 2022 there are 101 water basins in Chile and only 2 published Strategic Water Management Plans
• The General Directorate of Water (DGA) in Chile in 2022 has not implemented a "Monitoring Program" in the declared areas of restriction, according to the provisions of paragraph 6.4.2 of the Manual of Standards and Procedures for the Administration of Water Resources of the DGA.
• Close to 1 million people in Chile do not have access to safe drinking water

The magnitude of this problem is approximately 50%, so the estimated number of people affected in Chile is 10 million people.

Situation in the World:

• Nearly 1.2 billion people in the world live in water-scarce areas
• 1 in 3 people worldwide still do not have access to drinking water
• Half of the world’s population could be living in areas facing water scarcity by as early as 2025
• 30% to 50% of the world's water is obtained illegally
• Between 7 and 8 million Peruvians do not have access to drinking water. These citizens are supplied with water through tanker trucks that sell them the resource at a high cost, paying up to 2 times
• 2020, 15 million Brazilians living in urban areas do not have access to drinking water

Causes of the problem: Contamination, drought and uncontrolled water use.

Factors that promote this problem are illegal sales of purified water and misinformation in the community.

Consequences of the problem: 

• Food shortages leading to famine
• Disappearance of species 
• World conflicts over the available resource.
• Resorting to contaminated water sources that can cause diseases and deaths, such as those caused by diarrhea (502,000 per year), and some other common ones are cholera, dysentery, hepatitis A, typhoid fever and polio.

Our service CaliAqua  is an application developed through Thunkable, which allows its users to register alterations in water bodies to obtain up to 25% discount on their next water purchase registered in the application.

In addition, a certification with an advertising plan is offered to drinking water distributors.

Main and developed Features

Report contamination in water bodies: You must fill the fields with your email, location, description of the report and a photo. These data will be stored in an Airtable database and will soon be part of an analysis report to be sent to the Investigation Police (PDI) and to the National Water Authority as an environmental crime. [Chile]

*Future: In case of no internet connection, a draft will be saved and automatically uploaded when reconnected.

Buy drinking water: List of plan's suscriptor water distributors, with information on their services.

*Currenly a list with actual data of the water distributors in our locality is shown to exemplify the distribution of the information
*Future: Connect your bank account to store report data and accumulated discounts in order to make the purchase.

Future functions:

• QR Verification of water distributors
• Nearby drinking water points
• Water reports map
• Implement artificial intelligence through Python
  • Identify type of alteration in the water and generate an automatic analysis
  • Generate suspicions of places where water is being illegally withdrawn 

Users: People over legal age living in areas with water scarcity (mainly 18 to 65 years old)

• Pain: Buying or encountering contaminated water
• Need: Buy drinking water

Estimated amount in Chile: 10 million people
Brazil and Perú: 22 million people
Worldwide: 1.2 billion

Benefits by using the app: Buy drinking water with up to 25% cumulative discount.

Plan suscriptors: Water distribuitors

• Pain: Preference of other companies, difficulty in demonstrating water quality
• Need: To gain consumers

Estimated amount in Chile: 238
Estimated amount in Brazil and Perú: 690

Benefits by using the app: Traceability, quality certification and advertising to sell drinking water.

Benefits for the Environment

We seek to solve the need to have accesible and drinkable water for everyone, by just one click away (or 4 to be exact).  On the other hand we will promote the right to have uncontaminated water.

The water disturbances database can be used for biodiversity-water conservation, scientific research and the creation of innovation projects. By developing immediate reports, measures can be taken more quickly and effectively to solve this disturbance problem and thus avoid an aggravation due to lack of knowledge. In this way, it is expected to be able to use artificial intelligence to generate data analysis and to be able to prevent natural and man-made catastrophes.

We live in Atacama region in Chile, one of the areas most affected by water scarcity despite being a large agricultural area in the country. That is one of the reasons why we are uniquely positioned to offer the solution and solve the problem. Besides, two of the five members of our team live on the outskirts of the city, where it is more difficult to get drinking water, especially since the water coming from household water taps in those areas is not for human consumption.  On the other hand, some of us have gotten sick from drinking water from a tap at home in an area where the water should be for human consumption, to the point of spending two weeks sick with vomiting.  The most recent case was a few days ago, when one of our team mates drank tap water that had the smell and taste of chlorine. When she swallowed it, her throat burned and she spent the whole day feeling bad. 

A brief description of why each is well-positioned to deliver this solution:

• Diana Alcota Varas, business and pitch designer, programmer: She has already carried out several projects both in innovation and investigation, she is a competitive programmer and when she was a child she went to clean a beach with her family in an event. Her greatest strengths are business and public speaking.
• Mariana Escubort Morales, marketer: She has her own business. She likes finding solutions to problems in her science class aswell as finding solutions to improve her environment, seeking to create a better world, something Technovation has powered.
• Martina Meléndez Espinoza, Branding: She enjoys to drawing designs and using programs to do animations.
• Daphne Riarte Órdenes, phrases and ideas: In technovation chile she learned to work well in a team, that every opinion matters, that the app has much more than a simple database behind it and that on vacation you can do much more than sleep.
• Constanza Steverleynk, programmer: Through the Technovation program she learned different things like programming, speaking in public and being more sociable.

We were in the intensive Technovation Chile Bootcamp, where we created this project in 2 weeks at the start of January. For the competition, we went to the river to record our presentation video and we witnessed the contamination that exists in that water source, where at no time did we see anyone from the municipality or any external company carrying out some action to remove the garbage presented, which should be noted that there was even a supermarket cart and a bed mattress in the river.  All these events make us understand the daily situation that some people go through when they do not have access to water classified as drinking and of good quality, and also because they do not have or do not know where to report if they see any irregularity in any water source so that it can be take care of removing it and thus help the environment.  Therefore, we want to give them the possibility of easy and direct access to these options. 

Some support to our last saids are from our survey which had a scope of 13 people, and the most meaning answers were:

Most of whom felt identified with the problems that we wanted to solve in our application and who would also use our application and would be future testers of the prototype when we have the product. Most of the members of our group have participated in volunteering where they have helped to clean rivers and beaches, along with this, they have left garbage containers and signs to warn people who dirty the water sources that they are being recorded and that they should be they would be facing fines if they did. We have arranged a friendlier design for our potential users, since being people up to 65 years old we need to provide a product that is easy to use and understandable at a glance. On the other hand, we have ruled out some ideas thanks to the google form and the comments we have received from our potential users, in order to deliver an application that is not complex and is helpful.

Current solutions

• There are current solutions, but they do not help the distribution of certified water or to claim if the person sees irregularities in any water source. Among these application solutions are: 
  • Agrogriego Tattersal
  • Disk Água
  • Nueva Atacama
• Initially it was thought that the application could have a QR code to verify if your water purchase contains certified water thanks to a database. However when researching the Disk Água application we saw a business opportunity, because there are already applications like this, or people usually buy from the same person, without ensuring traceability, so we chose to generate a plan for traceability, certification and advertising for water distributors. In addition, we realized the need to be able to report alterations in water bodies so that the pertinent actions can be taken and these problems do not worsen, because, the virtual police station has many steps to make a report, and many are not aware of its existence.

Benefits for the customer

• Users: Buy drinking water with up to 25% cumulative discount. 
• Water Distribuitors: Traceability, quality certification and advertising to sell drinking water.

Benefits for the Enviroment

• The water disturbances database can be used for biodiversity-water conservation, scientific research and the creation of innovation projects. By developing immediate reports, measures can be taken more quickly and effectively to solve this disturbance problem and thus avoid an aggravation due to lack of knowledge.

Alliances with municipalities and the government

• We will make this project will encourage municipalities and the government to raise awareness about the care of the water sources that we have and that we all have the right to drink from water that we know is certified and safe for us.

Our focus

• Our focus is on water and how we can help people who find it more difficult to know the certification in the water bottles and how to claim if some water sorce is contaminated.
• We will make have a very big and positive impact for different people, since it will be a big contribution to our community and we will be able to improve the lives of many.

We are sure that our project is innovative since our objective is for people to use our application to buy easily accessible and discounted certified water if they do so from our service. We also want you to report if you see any irregularities in the bodies of water. 

Two objectives that we have never seen in any application or website related to water.

Our objectives for next year are:

• Generate alliances with the General Directorate of Water and the Investigation Police (PDI) 
  • Contacting them through email, explaining our goal and why we need them. 
• Launch the application officially in the appstore and playstore
  • Paying on Thunkable to post the application.
• Develop the subscription plan for water distributors
  • Through mentorings of Transbank,  Huawei and Claro Enterprises.
• Execute subscription plan for water distributors
  • Contact companies via email and schedule a virtual meetings.
• Promote our app to reach more people
  • With the help of radios, newspapers and other local and non-local media.
• Environmental goals
  • We want that when obtaining reports, an analysis of differences with the other reports can be made through other platforms to verify the efficiency of the solution.
  • We want those analyzes to be sold to other media where they can use that data to take or change actions that benefit the environment.

We hope that in the coming year this will have the greatest impact in different places of our country and be able to transform people's lives. 

The objective of the application that we will launch is to give people more accessibility so that they can give notices if they find places with water in poor condition (due to objects, color or spills of other liquids) or if they need to buy water from certified distributors.

Thunkable was used to develop our functional minimum viable product. 

The functions of the application are:

1.  Report disturbances in water bodies:
   • Thanks to the camera component in app features, you can take a photo, which is converted to a link by Cloudinary. To along with the information you give, be stored in an Airtable database.
   • Soon this will also be sent to the Investigation Police (PDI) of the country and to the National Water Authority as an environmental crime station once we realize the respective alliances.
2. To buy drinking water: 
   • In the app, the distributors are listed through a dataviewer list in components. We developed the database with Airtable. Currently when you click in one distributor, the contact and additional information are displayed.
   • However, you will be able to make in-app purchases once we develop the log in function to link bank accounts  after executing a plan for water distributors to store and make effective the discount per accepted report.
3. To Report errors of the application itself:
   • When you enter the application you can report errors thanks to the share component.

• The future app features are:
  • Map with nearby drinking water points and water disturbances.
  • Python Artificial intelligence to generate an analysis of the data on reports.

• Our application is not yet in use but we hope that when it is it will be well received. 
• In the next year and, therefore, responding at the same time to the question of what we expect in a year, we hope to have more than 700 users, who would use the app continuously.
• In four years we plan to expand our application to Brazil and Peru. We expect to have more than 6000 users who can use this application and that it can serve them. We would like our application to help as many people as possible, either from different places or countries without or with difficulties for the distribution of water and potability.

Financial: Consulting services to carry out the project, officially launch the application on the expected platforms and the salary for our workers and for ourselves.

Technical: Automate the analysis of reports within the Airtable database using Python. Enable in-application purchases.

Legal: Formalize the company, obtain permits and quality verification of the water distribution plan.

Cultural: Change the mentality of people to ensure that they will prefer to buy quality drinking water, taking into account that it has a higher price, but at the same time the user obtains a discount when doing so through the application, in addition to helping their health by preferring water certified.

Market: People should prefer to order water with us as an intermediary instead of calling or sending a message to their trusted distributor, which will also lead us to make a contract with that distributor so that they do not take advantage of the situation and prefer to sell water to that user without our application.

We currently have no partners, but when we spoke with the Seremi of the environment of our region, Ingrid Aguad; we saw the possibility of a future alliance with the General Directorate of Water and the investigative police.

On the other hand, as Diana (team leader), was the winner of the InpiraTEC 2022 award, we hope to use the new contacts and technology awards, storage and mentoring, to also take the CaliAqua project to a higher level.

Type of business: Social Enterprise

Key resources:  Storage for database and its analysis, plan for water distribuitors  (from permits, cost of tools and research for each distributor)

Key activities: Data Analysis

Ideal partners: General Directorate of Water, Investigative Police, Environmental Brigade and Ministry of the Environment:

Type of intervention: Service, app and future website.

Channels: 

• App: Appstore and Playstore, while currently Thunkable.
• Word of mouth, partnerships, flyers participation in competitions.
  Instagram, Tiktok, Facebook, Twitter, Gmail

Metrics: Reports of water alterations, in-app transactions, subscriptions.

Customer Value:

Users: Buy drinking water with up to 25% cumulative discount.
Water Distribuitors: Traceability, quality certification and advertising to sell drinking water.

Social Impact:

The water disturbances database can be used for biodiversity-water conservation, scientific research and the creation of innovation projects. By developing immediate reports, measures can be taken more quickly and effectively to solve this disturbance problem and thus avoid an aggravation due to lack of knowledge.