Located in the foothills of the Sierra Madre Mountains, San Rafael Pie de la Cuesta is one of six municipalities in the Western Highlands of Guatemala that benefits from USAID’s work in adapting communications technology to improve public service delivery. USAID’s Nexos Locales project partnered with the Guatemalan Ministry of Finance on an innovative water metering and billing application to provide citizens with a transparent and effective means to pay their water bills.
Prior to USAID’s involvement, San Rafael Pie de la Cuesta was not unlike many other municipalities, where Municipal Water and Sanitation workers must hand write thousands of meter readings in a notebook every month and then enter all the data into a national billing system. This time and resource intensive system means that citizens wait up to five hours in line in just to pay their water bills, often discouraging them from paying at all.
