Water

Water Briefs
Water Operators Partnership Program
August 2008

About 71% of people without access to improved sanitation and 56% of those who lack safe water live in Asia. People who do not have these basic services face incredible health risks, are often forced to sacrifice their education or livelihood, and suffer indignity and inconvenience everyday.

Asian water utilities are at the forefront of efforts to counter this common scenario. Theirs is the critical responsibility of providing water supply and sanitation services to Asia’s 4 billion people. But their task is hampered by numerous challenges—artificially low tariffs, staff incapacity, insufficient budgets for infrastructure development, and more.

To deliver sustained and world class service, utilities need considerable help from various partners. One key partner is their peers.

Strengthening the capacity of utilities to deliver adequate and sustainable services is central to improving the global water supply and sanitation situation.

Recognizing this, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the Global Water Partnership Program began collaborating in 2006 to implement a Water Operators’ Partnership (WOPs) Program for Asia. The WOPs program works to enable water utilities to improve service coverage and delivery, financial sustainability, and other aspects of their performance.

The WOPs is actually part of a larger plan to achieve breakthroughs in vital areas of water supply and resources management and attain the Millennium Development Goals—the Hashimoto Action Plan (HAP). Announced by the United Nations Secretary General’s Advisory Board on Water and Sanitation (UNSGAB) in early 2006, the HAP called for breakthroughs in six key areas: water operators’ partnerships, financing, sanitation, monitoring and reports, integrated water resources management, and water disaster.

UNSGAB has asked the different regional development banks, including ADB, to assist in operationalizing the plan.

ADB implements WOPs through the Regional Technical Assistance (RETA) 6396: Supporting Water Operators’ Partnership in Asia, financed by the Japan Special Fund and approved in April 2007.

Three more twins are planned this year, most likely to involve utilities from the Kyrgyz Republic, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan

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To achieve its aims, WOPs adopted key strategies whose activities and outputs are interlinked to ensure that targeted support is given to utilities. These strategies are:

• Formation of Water Utilities Networks (WUNs)
  These WUNs promote alliances, knowledge exchange, and capacity development among member water utilities. They also anchor all WOPs activities designed to improve the operational and financial efficiency of members.
• Continuous Improvement and Benchmarking
  This involves collecting, analyzing, and comparing key performance data of water and sanitation utilities and, on the basis of analysis, developing a strategy and work program to improve specific aspects of a utility’s performance.
• Twinning of Water Utilities
  Exemplary water utilities in the region are being tapped to help developing utilities enhance their skills and operational efficiency. Ten pairings involving utilities from the WUNs as beneficiaries are planned under this program.
• Training Workshops
  WOPs will implement a series of training workshops focused on technical aspects of utility operations, including but not limited to nonrevenue water (NRW) reduction, improving tariff structures and institutional arrangements, introducing regulatory principles, and more.

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A little over a year after WOPs was implemented, the program has already begun showing promising results.

Formation of Water Utility Networks

There are three WUNs currently implementing their programs actively:

• South East Asian Water Utilities Network (SEAWUN), established in August 2002 prior to WOPs but whose programs are now implemented with WOPs support; SEAWUN has 78 member utilities coming from Indonesia, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Viet Nam.
• South Asian Water Utilities Network (SAWUN), established in April 2007, with 23 members coming from Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.
• Central Asia and South Caucasus Water Utilities Association (CASCWUA), established in November 2007, and has 13 members from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.

Preparations are now underway for the establishment of the East Asia Water Utilities Network in the second half of 2008.

Water Utilities Organizational Structure

The organizational structure of WUNs has three tiers

• A steering committee or governing board, comprising elected representatives from utilities of each of the participating countries, that is responsible for setting the network’s policies, plans, and monitoring results;
• A secretariat, headed by an Executive Director and based in a host utility, that oversees for the daily operations of the network; and
• Member utilities, comprising public or private water and/or wastewater utilities, national water and wastewater associations, and small scale service providers.

Each WUN serves as a platform for the major initiatives of WOPs: continuous improvement and benchmarking, twinning with expert utilities, and training workshops for capacity development. They also implement their respective business plans and mobilize resources for their specific needs.

Continuous Improvement and Benchmarking

CIB Work Flow

This program seeks to help utilities establish internal processes and build skilled teams to collect, analyze, and measure their services and then compare their performance and service practices against those of other utilities. This yields sufficient insights to enable the utility teams to identify improvement opportunities, craft change proposals, and then drive their implementation to achieve better results.

Simply put, the change processes and skills to achieve change is the continuous improvement part, while benchmarking provides comparative information that can be used to craft change proposals.

To date, continuous improvement and benchmarking (CIB) workshops have been conducted for each of the WUNs, designed to build staff capacity for the process and provide guidance on institutionalizing CIB in the organization. About a hundred utility personnel attended these sessions. Member utilities have also agreed to participate in the WOPs’ CIB program—SAWUN: 21 utilities, SEAWUN: 17 utilities, and CASCWUA: 11 utilities.

Twinning with Expert Utilities

Busy day at the Cebu Water District payment center

Whereas most twinning arrangements pair off entities with similar characteristics on the assumption that they will share similar problems and solutions, WOP’s approach is to match a stronger water and sanitation utility (expert) with a developing utility (recipient). The aim is to enable the latter to improve service coverage and delivery, financial sustainability, and other aspects of its performance.

There is no commercial motive in WOPs’ twinning; it is essentially a case of one utility helping another out. Activities under this program include a diagnostic study of the recipient twin by the expert twin and ADB, exchange visits, and on-site demonstrations.

Under RETA 6396, ADB proposes to support 10 twins. One twinning arrangement between Cambodia and Viet Nam commenced in July 2007. Six more were finalized between November 2007 and June 2008. To date, the following twinning arrangements are operational:

All expert twins have completed their diagnostic evaluation of the recipient twins to determine the latter’s requirements and immediate areas of concern. Some of the recipient twins, on the other hand, have visited their partner’s locations to observe their operations. Both parties have agreed on a work program designed to raise specific performance levels of the recipient twins, and these work programs are now in varying stages of implementation.

Training Workshops

Participants to the first NRW training, May 2008 at ADB headquarters

To improve the technical capacity of water utilities, WOPs will design and implement training programs focused on specific aspects of utility operations. Among the possible topics are:

• NRW management
• Tariff setting and regulation
• Asset management
• Cost recovery
• Improved metering, billing, and collection

The first training workshop, held at the ADB headquarters in May 2008 with support from the World Bank Institute, was part of a programmatic curriculum on NRW management. Around 70 representatives from 40 SAWUN and SEAWUN member utilities spent an entire week learning how to establish a standardized water balance, calculate water losses, reduce commercial and physical water losses, and formulate an NRW Assessment and Management Plan. A post-training evaluation revealed that the different backgrounds and perspectives of the participants fostered richer and more diverse discussions, thereby heightening their learning experience.

To ensure application of the knowledge acquired from the training, the participants were given take-home assignments to establish their respective utility’s water balance and verify its components, calculate commercial and physical losses, and carry out a pressure monitoring program on their own facilities. These skills will enable utilities to design an NRW management and reduction program. These assignments must be submitted to ADB before the utility representatives can participate in more advanced courses of this NRW curriculum.

In the meantime, a series of leadership forums are being prepared for the three WUNs. These forums will explore the different factors contributing to the success of some Asian utilities, e.g. Cambodia’s Phnom Penh Water Supply Authority, the Philippines’ Manila Water Company Inc., Singapore’s Public Utilities Board, and Viet Nam’s Hai Phong Water Supply Services.

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For further information, please contact the following:

Asian Development Bank
Paul van Klaveren
Water Supply and Sanitation Specialist
pvanklaveren@adb.org

Mai Flor
Water Governance Specialist (Consultant)
mflor@adb.org

Central Asia and South Caucasus Water Utility Association
Valeriy Sundukov
223, Abay Prospekt, Astana City, 010008, Kazakhstan
+7 7172376685
kazsu@astanainfo.kz
www.cascwua.org

South Asian Water Utilities Network
Rajendra Ganeshlal Holani
Central Building, Pune 411 001, India
+91 20 2613 1917
cemjppn@rediffmail.com
www.sawun.org

South East Asian Water Utilities Network Vu Kim Quyen
Rm. 12B05, 13th Floor, 71 Nguyen Chi Thanh Building
Dong Sa District Hanoi, Viet Nam
+84 4 2752677
vkquyen@seawun.org
www.seawun.org