The Water Utility Programme for Africa

The Water Utility Programme for Africa
5/17/2002
Banjul, May 17, 2002 (The Independent/All Africa Global Media via COMTEX) -- The Water Utility Partnership for Capacity Building in Africa (WUP) is a joint programme initiated by the Union of African Water Suppliers (UAWS) Abidjan, Cote dIvoire; the Regional Centre for Low cost Water and Sanitation (CREPA) Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso; and the Centre for Training, Research and Networking for Development (TREND) Kumasi, Ghana.

The basic idea leading to the creation of WUP is to build a partnership among Africas water supply and sanitation utilities (WSSU) and other key sector institutions to create opportunities for sharing of experiences and capacity building.

The World Health Organisation and the UN Childrens Fund, reported that in 1994, 36 percent of Africas urban inhabitants did not have access to adequate water supply services, and 45 percent had deficient sanitation services. Furthermore, UN Habitat II estimated that between 1990 and 2025, Africas urban population is expected to grow from 150 million to 700 million, representing an increase in the total urban population from 30 to 52 percent. The problem of urban water supply and sanitation very serious now, and will even be more overwhelming in the near future.

Effective functioning of water supply and sanitation utilities, whether private or public are necessary to address these challenges.

Unfortunately, many of them in Africa are operating at a low level of efficiency and have limited funds for improving their operations.

Recognizing that access to safe water for the fast growing urban population is not only the key to this problem, but also essential to reducing poverty, to deal with environmental problems and to enhance productivity and economic development in Africa, UAWS, CREPA, and TREND launched WUP, with the support of World Bank in 1996.

Being an African institution, this programme is in a very unique position to facilitate reforms, promote ownership and learning and identify innovative ways for improving the quality of services.

The ultimate goal of the WUP programme is to increase the coverage of water supply and sanitation services and to improve the quality of this service through increase in investments and reform qualities.

The programmes main objectives are strengthening the capacity of WSSU to provide adequate and affordable water services sustainable for the long term, promoting and facilitating institutional reforms of the water sector in Africa in terms of service delivery, cost recovery, operation and maintenance, with special emphasis on service delivery improvement in peri-urban areas. Fostering collaboration between WSSUs, community based and non-governmental organisations, and the formal and informal private sectors.

The objectives also include creating harmony between WSSUs, International Training Network Centres, the Union of African Water Suppliers, and information and research organisations, Building the capacity of institutions and professionals by making full use of the experience of successful African water supply and sanitation utilities for the benefit of service providers in Africa.

The WUP seeks to achieve the above objectives through different but very closely linked projects.

a) Reform of the water sector in Africa.

This project aims at promoting institutional reforms (including public-private partnerships and promoting regulatory frameworks) to ensure a well functioning and sustainable water sector in Africa.

Studies have shown that poor choices with regard to sector policies, institutional and regulatory frameworks have been root cause of problems in the water sector b) Service providers performance indicators and Benchmarking Network The purpose of the project is to provide utilities with sustainable arrangements for compiling and sharing perfor