DAWACO serves 53% of the total population estimated at 800,000. Water supply is sufficient to meet demand but with a bottleneck in distribution. Across the system, pipes are old cast iron which have outlived their useful life but replacement has been taking place. A major distribution problem is taking over areas developed by third parties whose quality of piping has proved to be of poor quality and prone to leakage. NRW is assessed at around 38-40% across the system.
DAWACO has an ongoing large support program (valued at $3.6 million including 300,000 counterpart funds) with the Dutch Government through the technical support of Vitens Evides, a leading Dutch utility. As a consequence of this extensive support, the scope of the twinning program was carefully tailored to avoid any duplication of effort, confusion by having differences in solutions or creating a situation in which DAWACO cannot cope with the volume of proposed changes.
Compared to HAWASU, DAWACO has much higher NRW, it achieves lower personnel productivity and it has less developed management practices with a more fragmented organization and lesser compensation for its managers and staff. Twinning support focuses on the areas offering improvement and impact upon the results for DAWACO namely:
- Reducing 40% NRW. Proposals have been made by DAWACO to tackle this issue - but it seems that the plans may be over reliant on engineering solutions - involving significant cost to upgrade the distribution system. Opportunities exist in metering and detecting illegal connections, apart from active leak detection and pipe replacement;
- Increasing productivity - compared to HAWASU there is considerable scope to rationalize meter reading and collectors (around 100 staff in DAWACO). This issue of greater productivity extends to re assessing the personnel practices on hiring, training and appraisal;
- Strengthening management - there is scope to make DAWACO more professional and results oriented by reducing compartmentalization and encouraging greater cooperation among departments.
These areas were agreed by DAWACO and HAWASU with the facilitation of ADB during the diagnostic visit from May 23 to 30, 2008.
This twinning is facilitated by Asian Development Bank.
