Kelvin Gacheru is the founder of Mobi-Water, a system that is used to track water availability in homes, manage consumption, and allow property and utility managers to remotely bill water usage.

“I always dreamt of being a water engineer. Water is in my heart being an Aquarius as I am born in January,” Kelvin says.

Kelvin landed his first job after graduating with a Bachelor of Science in Water Resources Engineering (Environmental Biosystems Engineering) from the University of Nairobi in 2014.

He was working as a project manager for Africaqua. But after just a year and a half in the job that entailed setting up water projects in rural and urban areas, he quit.

He went on to set up his own company, Mobi-Water – a real-time smart water monitoring, management, and billing platform.

Working at Africaqua, he would be involved in the setting up of water projects which would either constantly break down or fail.

This piqued the Nairobi School alumnus’ interest to think of how to come up with a low-cost, readily available, and robust enough system to stand harsh conditions. This is how Mobi-Water was born.

Four years down the line, the company has over 400 organizations as its clients including hospitals and shopping malls.

“All our solutions are smart and are remotely available on mobile apps, SMS, and dashboard. The hardware is designed from scratch locally.” The 32-year-old describes himself as a problem-solver.

“I may be seated at our offices along Thika Road, but we can track water availability in schools in Kakamega without having to go outside and say this school urgently needs water by evening.”

The system is currently being used in Kenya, Tanzania, and Madagascar with a pilot in Sierra Leone.