Accra, Aug 27, GNA - Aqua Vitens Rand Limited (AVRL) has been given an extra six million dollars for its administrative and other non-contractual expenses for the next two years of its five-year urban water management contract.

Mr Andy Barber, Managing Director of AVRL, told the GNA that the money was a grant from the Dutch Embassy in Ghana to support AVRL during the last two years of its contract. "This is clearly a vote of confidence in AVRL for the level of efficiency we have brought into the management of the urban water sector in Ghana," he said.

AVRL was awarded a five-year World Bank-funded contract in November 2005 as operator of the urban water sector, with GWCL as the grantor. Under the US$120 million contract, AVRL was mandated to make the urban water sector financially viable by improving water distribution and revenue collection, cutting down on non-revenue water, reducing chemical usage and cost and reducing energy consumption and cost. AVRL came in on non-profit basis and for that matter the company, a joint venture between two public sector companies, Vitens of Holland and Rand Water of South Africa, did not make any investments and was therefore not mandated to determine tariffs.

The contract sum comprised of US$103 million grant from the World Bank, US$12 million counter-funding from the government of Ghana and five million dollars from the Nordic Development Fund (NDF), which went directly to AVRL for minor repairs, replacements and rehabilitation (RRR) works over the five years.

GWCL, as the grantor, had control over the US$103 million World Bank grant for the purposes of major capital investments regarding the large scale expansion works on the water production system. Since AVRL came, they have established a meter workshop where thousands of water meters, donated by Vitens of Holland, are calibrated and distributed to customers, a toll free call centre and a novelty Geographical Information System (GIS) through which all customers have been captured in a computer-base data and thousands of illegal and evasive consumers have now been roped into the metering and billing system.

Mr. Barber said even though much had been achieved over the three years, there was a great deal more to be done to improve the water production system and to optimise the benefits of the management systems put in place by AVRL.

Mr. Barber said in the course of the first three years, AVRL had to make huge non-contractual expenses, particularly on customer-based activities, partly owing to which the company's administrative allocation was heavily burdened, warranting the intervention of the Dutch government.

He said most of the non-contractual expenses were intended to make water production and management customer-centred rather than engineering-centred, adding that over the period about 4,000 school children benefited from education programmes, while several community leaders also benefited from training, beside several other social responsibility projects.

Mr. Barber assured the public that in the remaining two years, AVRL would continue to make worthwhile investments, particularly in customer-based projects to ensure that by the end of the five-year contract, Ghanaians would have been roped into water management at the local level.

Mr. Patrick Apoya, Executive Secretary of the Coalition of NGOs in Water and Sanitation (CONIWAS), also told the GNA that CONIWAS appreciated some of the challenges facing AVRL and how they had managed to ride the tide to make strides in three years. He noted that AVRL was given no baseline figures by which their performance could be measured and yet government had proceeded on a mid-term review of AVRL's performance.

"I think the review would be more subjective than objective without the baseline figures," he said.

He observed, for instance, that AVRL was mandated to reduce non-revenue water by five per cent every year for the five-year period, meaning they were to reduce non-revenue water by 25 per cent by the close of the period, but no baseline figures were provided as to what exactly non-revenue water level was, except non-scientific estimates. Mr. Apoya said in as much as the challenges facing AVRL should be appreciated, the focus of CONIWAS was on the results of their work and not just the expenses made.

"It is important to note that the World Bank had specific result-oriented goals in mind when they gave out the funds for the AVRL contract and it would not be in the interest of AVRL, Ghanaians and the World Bank for CONIWAS to start singing the praises of AVRL on the basis of the expenses made," he said.

He told the GNA that CONIWAS had set a monitoring mechanism in motion to gather data on the result of AVRL's operations in the country and would publish that report in due course. 27 Aug 09