Finding leaks from orbit: how network loss became a data problem

Utilities worldwide lose about 346 million cubic metres of water every day, worth a conservative US$39 billion a year. Some of the highest national loss rates anywhere are in this region.¹ The plumbing has not changed much in the past decade. The instruments have, and leakage stopped being invisible.

The ten highest reported loss rates, and the three lowest for comparison. Sources are on each country dashboard; the percentage itself misleads, as the next sections show.

Three layers of seeing

The classic instrument is the district metered area, meaning a block of roughly 1,500 connections isolated by closing the valves around it. Meter the single way in and read the flow at three in the morning, when honest demand is nearly zero. Whatever still moves is mostly leaking. The method gives a district a loss figure. It does not give a location.

Acoustics answer the where. A pressurised leak vibrates the pipe wall for hundreds of metres. Paired loggers time the same sound arriving at two points and place the break to within a metre or two on a metal main. That accuracy is the difference between digging one hole in the road and twenty.

The newest layer is orbital. L-band synthetic-aperture radar, a satellite signal at a wavelength long enough to see a few metres into soil, tells treated drinking water apart from rain or groundwater by its chlorine and mineral signature. Commercial services now sell city-wide leak surveys from satellite passes. They flag suspected leaks down to roughly half a litre per minute, which narrows thousands of kilometres of pipe to a few hundred points worth walking with a crew.³

The percentage trap

The headline number itself needs handling with care. A World Bank paper co-authored by Roland Liemberger constructs the example: a network supplied 12 hours a day reads 20% loss. Supply the identical network continuously, with not one leak repaired, and the reading rises to 29%, because water runs out of the same holes for twice as long.² A utility can therefore improve its network and watch its headline number worsen.

Amman is the standing example. Miyahuna reported 44.7% in 2023, but its network is pressurised only 22.6% of the time, and the volumetric series tells the opposite story: loss per connection fell from 1.25 to 0.99 cubic metres a day between 2019 and 2023.⁵ The 2023 headline rise was an accounting event, the merger of Balqa governorate and its 62% losses into Miyahuna’s books. Litres per connection per day is the measure that survives comparison. The percentage is the measure that makes headlines.

The meter is the other half

In much of the region the larger loss is commercial rather than physical. Ageing mechanical meters under-register, connections go unbilled, bills go uncollected. Under intermittent supply the metering problem compounds: the EU’s Jordan policy review notes meters begin under-registering within two years in these conditions.⁶ The flagship procurements follow that money. Amman’s utility is deploying 76,000 ultrasonic smart meters as the core of its loss-reduction plan.⁴ Static meters do not wear, and they read hourly, which turns every customer into a sensor.

What good looks like, with a caveat

Dubai is the standing rebuttal to the argument that the region’s heat and pressures make losses inevitable. DEWA reports network losses of 4.5% for 2024 and 4.4% for 2025, among the lowest figures published anywhere, achieved with this same equipment: district metering, pressure management, smart meters, and a billing system that collects.⁷ The figure deserves one caveat. DEWA publishes no full water balance behind it, so the headline cannot be split into physical and commercial losses or tested against a volumetric measure.

On the volumetric measure the gap between the two cities is wider than the headline percentages suggest, roughly 990 litres per account per day measured in Amman against about 77 in Dubai.⁵ The commercial case follows from that arithmetic. Recovered leakage is treated, pressurised water already inside the city, and it costs a fraction of any new source.

Why the money now flows through contracts, not grants

Donor finance tried first and mostly failed. More than JOD 1.28 billion has been committed to non-revenue water in Jordan alone, and an EU-funded review in May 2024 tabulated the results: a KfW programme of EUR 18.8 million in Karak with no measured impact, a EUR 28.5 million programme in the north with little, and a USAID programme of USD 42.5 million whose gains were not sustained because operations staff breached the zonal boundaries the scheme depended on.⁶ The transferable lesson is the zone breach: district metering only works if operators respect the districts, and during a shortage the incentive to open a valve beats the incentive to protect a measurement.

The procurement model has shifted in response. Amman’s new contract pays a private operator against measured volumetric reduction over roughly 24 years, with the IFC advising, the first performance-based NRW concession at this scale in the region.⁸ Payment against outcome, not equipment, is the design answer to a decade of equipment that changed nothing.

In the region

Every large programme in the region now carries a technology line. Jordan’s is the furthest advanced: the projects register tracks the Amman performance contract and the North Jordan NRW reduction programme. Saudi Arabia’s National Water Company runs distribution under management contracts with loss targets. Egypt’s holding company and Oman’s Nama group both procure metering and district-metering packages. Suppliers that win tend to pair hardware with analytics, and increasingly take payment against measured performance rather than against delivery.

The case study

One scheme in this sector, examined in full: what was built, what it cost, what worked and what did not.

Who is doing this

The buyers and operators behind the procurements this brief describes.

• MiyahunaUtility · Jordan
• Dubai Electricity & Water Authority (DEWA)Utility · United Arab Emirates
• National Water Company (NWC)Utility · Saudi Arabia
• Holding Company for Water & Wastewater (HCWW)Utility · Egypt

Mandates, procurement routes and the rest of the region’s institutions are in the decision-maker directory.

What to watch

• 2026Amman’s performance-based NRW contract, the region’s largest: qualification closed on 23 April 2026 and US commercial reporting expects the request for proposals and the award within 2026, on a roughly 24-year term.⁸ Progress is tracked on the procurement page.

Further reading

• Liemberger, R. & Wyatt, A. (2019), “Quantifying the global non-revenue water problem”, Water Supply 19(3). The global loss estimate this brief opens with. doi.org
• Kingdom, B., Liemberger, R. & Marin, P. (2006), The Challenge of Reducing Non-Revenue Water in Developing Countries, World Bank. The paper behind the percentage trap. documents1.worldbank.org
• LDK Consultants / EU WES, NRW Policy for Jordan (May 2024). Governorate tables and the honest accounting of what donor programmes achieved. wes-med.eu
• ASTERRA, methodology for satellite leak detection, the orbital layer described here. asterra.io
• IFC press release (6 June 2024) on the agreement behind Amman’s performance-based NRW contract. ifc.org