'Prepaid water meters have technological risk' - Water distribution and customer services manager says

The Harare City Water distribution and customer services manager Engineer Hosiah Chisango has said there is a technological risk in introducing the pre-paid water meters in the city.

Harare Residents Trust indicated that Chisango made the remarks at the meeting.

"Engineer Hosiah Chisango, Harare Water Distribution and Customer Services Manager. "There is a technological risk to the introduction of prepaid water meters," said the trust.

"The City of Harare has funding constraints to fund the roll out of prepaid water meters. We are facing communication challenges, and having problems communicating to our stakeholders. There is a genuine risk that the prepaid water meters would fail to give us the project results."

Esther Chimanikire, HRT Spokesperson, said "Their risk analysis was internal, they did not do an external risk analysis. They did not talk about the risk on the environment, the potential of disease outbreaks like typhoid and cholera. They did not talk of how people will respond to unexpected fire outbreaks. The social and gender aspects have been neglected, yet women and children will bear the responsibility of fetching water from unprotected water sources, given the fact that people do not have money."