Papua New Guinea: Water Supply Scheme for Tete Settlement

Water and other urban infrastructure and services / Urban water supply

PNG is the largest and most populated Pacific nation, with a population of at least 8.15 million. The urban population of the capital Port Moresby is estimated at about 800,000, of which more than half live in informal settlements. While the urban growth rate is around 2%, growth rates in informal settlements of between 5% and 8% have been reported. This rapid urbanization has contributed significantly to a growing landless class living in squatter and informal settlements with limited or no access to basic social services. These settlements are now an established feature of the urban landscape in Port Moresby.

PNG did not meet the Millennium Development Goals for access to improved water supply and sanitation. Household access to basic water supply (37%) and basic sanitation (19%) remained stagnant between 2000 and 2015. Water utilities such as NCD Water and Sewerage Pty Limited (trading as Eda Ranu), the state-owned enterprise responsible for water and sewerage provision in Port Moresby, struggle to provide acceptable services to existing customer bases, and have difficulty keeping pace with urban growth in formalized communities. Challenges are greater for extending services to informal settlements with unsecured land tenure and to those in peri-urban areas. Limited access to safe water and improved sanitation undermines public health, and significantly contributes to PNG's high infant mortality rate (54 deaths per 1,000 births in 2017). Poor public health results in low labor productivity, forgone employment opportunities, and added health-related expenses among households, which in turn exacerbates hardship and constrains sustainable development.

Tete settlement, on the northern outskirts of Port Moresby, has an estimated population of 8,000 residents and is growing rapidly. The community is serviced by only one water standpipe (tap), which provides water from the Eda Ranu network. The standpipe is the only source of safe water within Tete, and supply is intermittent and unpredictable. Water is most often collected by women and girls, who walk more than 15 minutes to reach the water collection point, and spend more than 2 hours collecting water due to long queues. Consequently, most members of the community, particularly women and children, have no option other than to use contaminated ground and swamp water for washing and personal hygiene.

An existing informal community committee currently collects payments from households to cover the cost of metered water supplied by Eda Ranu. The community has expressed a strong interest for donor assistance to improve services, including safe water supply. This would require upgrading the connection from the Eda Ranu network to Tete, installing one or more water tanks at suitable elevations to distribute water by gravity within Tete, and strengthening the community's capacity to manage and to equitably supply safe water within the community. Eda Ranu has expressed in-principle support for expanding its services to Tete but does not have the necessary financial resources. The utility wishes to enter a partnership with a community and a donor to install infrastructure, given that it is mandated to provide universal access to safe water and to improve water supply service delivery standards in Port Moresby.

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) is currently administering a capacity development technical assistance (9298-PNG) Support for Water and Sanitation Sector Management ($700,000) in PNG. Complementary to this support, an ADB intervention via a small stand-alone grant to implement a community-driven water supply pilot project at Tete settlement represents an opportunity for high-impact service improvement at a relatively low cost. An intervention in Tete also provides an opportunity to develop and test a model for a community-led water supply scheme in a settlement area with potential for scale-up or replication, including via the proposed ADB investment project. The proposed assistance for the Tete community is aligned with recent requests from government to plan and pilot water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) management models in district towns and settlement areas and will complement the ongoing technical assistance.

New water supply infrastructure constructed

Tete community sustainably manages its water supply

Management model for community-managed water supply in urban informal settlement areas is developed

The project will address poor access to safe water in Tete Settlement, an informal settlement of about 8,000 people in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea.

Outputs include: (i) new water supply infrastructure, (ii) effective community management of Tete water supply scheme, and (iii) model developed for community-managed water supply scheme in settlement areas.