MSD Fellows Strengthen Safe Water Network's Digital Monitoring Capabilities

Safe Water Network India has been selected for the prestigious 2025 MSD Richard T. Clark Fellowship for Global Health, marking another milestone in our thirteen-year-long partnership with MSD (known as Merck in the United States and Canada). This 10-week collaborative project, running from July 28 to October 3, 2025, focuses on enhancing our ACOM mobile and web application to enable real-time monitoring of water quality and service delivery across our operations.

Three MSD fellows—Clover Lim from Sydney, Gopal Dahal from Philadelphia, and Kara Giacose from New Jersey—spent three intensive weeks in India (July 28-August 14) understanding our field operations. Working closely with our teams in Delhi and Hyderabad, they are developing enhanced features for our ACOM platform that will revolutionize how we monitor and manage water stations.

The upgraded system will feature a user-friendly interface for entering water supply and quality data, with built-in alarms for quality deviations. Advanced analytics and automatically generated dashboards will enable remote monitoring of multiple locations, while differentiated access levels will serve head office, field office, and operator needs.

This collaboration builds on our substantial partnership history with MSD. In 2012, we launched a three-year initiative in Andhra Pradesh that expanded safe water access to over 50,000 people across dozens of communities. More recently, MSD Fellows conducted a comprehensive Health Impact Assessment of our iJal stations in Telangana, demonstrating significant health improvements among users, including 78% reporting no family illness compared to 40% among non-users.

“This fellowship represents the evolution of our partnership from direct service delivery to digital innovation,” said Poonam Sewak, VP of Partnerships and Programs. “The enhanced ACOM platform will strengthen our ability to ensure consistent water quality and reliable service delivery across our growing network.”

The fellowship exemplifies how corporate partnerships can drive technological advancement in the development sector, ultimately benefiting the thousands of communities we serve across India and Ghana.