News Update: New Partnership with World bank.
NEWS UPDATE: UTILITY OF THE FUTURE (UoF) – WATER SERVICE PROVIDERS IN KENYA SET TO JOIN PROGRAM SPONSORED BY WORLD BANK
The government of Kenya has laid out a vision for universal access to water and sanitation services by 2030. But Kenya’s chronically inefficient water utilities are creating a fiscal burden and making it a big challenge for the government to achieve the Vision 2030 goal on water. Speaking during a workshop held on Tuesday, 27th September, 2022 at Biblica Conference Center, Nairobi, WASREB’s Dir. Licensing, Standards and Advocacy Eng. Peter Njaggah said Kenya’s water utilities lose approximately Kshs. 10.5 Billion annually, due to operational inefficiencies. The sources of these inadequacies are well known. They are brought about by operational and organization inefficiencies .
He revealed that WASREB with technical assistance from the World Bank is developing a Utility Efficiency Improvement Program. The program will tackle a range of operational and technical inefficiencies that have plagued Kenya’s Water Service Providers (WSPs) for a long time. The objective of the program is to determine the major drivers of organizational inefficiencies, including high staff costs, in selected six water utilities and identify opportunities to bring personnel expenditure within the sector benchmarks.
To this end, WASREB has identified six WSPs for analysis, with sizes ranging from Small to Very Large as per WASREB categorization. The six WSPs are Nairobi, Muranga, Gatundu, Nyahururu, Tuuru and Chemususu.
The Objectives of the UoF program are:
a) Ignite actions, improvement and sustainable transformation of water and/or sanitation utilities
b) Guide utilities through the transformation process by working parallel with them, to strengthen their essential processes and develop their future-thinking capabilities to navigate a rapidly changing environment, provide a practical, simple and effective methodology to implement the transformation process in water utilities
c) Strengthen a utility’s internal capabilities in operational and managerial processes, as well as, in human and leadership skills
d) Bring a utility’s team on board, gain their commitment and empower them to transform the utility
e) Connect utilities with peers globally, to facilitate knowledge exchange and know-how
f) Provide the water and sanitation sector with tools available to the public, within the open knowledge philosophy of the UoF program.