Lusaka, the capital city of Zambia, has familiar water supply and hygiene problems. Managing director George Ndongwe tells John O’Hanlon how Lusaka Water & Sewerage Company aspires to become a world-class utility.
Already over three million, Lusaka’s population is increasing at something like three per cent per annum, and the city is changing. Its people are getting more prosperous and their expectations are expanding. As the country becomes more wealthy on the back of its natural resources, business and industry is being drawn into the city and it is attracting international investment again after some lean years.
Zambia, being a hilly country with access to major rivers, is not exactly short of water, but water quality is a real problem in some rural areas. Water can also be a problem in the cities, because of under-investment in infrastructure causing a failure to deliver safe drinking water, not to mention sanitation, to significant parts of the population.
When George Ndongwe was appointed four years ago to lead Lusaka Water & Sewerage Company, he was faced with a run-down water and sewerage system which was ill maintained, unreliable, and without a functioning revenue collection system. The job of turning this situation round within Lusaka itself was daunting enough, and it became considerably more challenging in 2008 when responsibility for the adjacent regions of Kafue Chongwe and Luangwa were added to Lusaka Water’s remit.
Though Lusaka Water & Sewerage is wholly owned by the City Council, it operates like a private company. All its revenue comes from the charges it levies for its services, and it receives no grant or subsidy. Capital projects are another matter; while routine maintenance comes from and is limited by the utility’s resources, it has managed to secure international development funding for much of the major infrastructure work that is being carried out.
A master plan for the entire province of Lusaka is being developed with assistance from the Millennium Science Initiative (MSI), a project ofthe World Bankand theScience Initiative Group, based in the United States— an international initiative to build capacity in science and technology in the developing world. “We are hoping the master plan will be ready towards the end of 2011, but until then it is difficult to be very specific about the priorities it will identify and the level of investment that will be needed,” says Ndongwe.
Within the city itself the situation is not too bad, he continues. Around 70 per cent of the population has access to potable water, and one of the key outcomes will be to increase that to 100 per cent. However, a big proportion of Lusaka’s population falls into what are called the peri-urban areas and the sanitation situation in these areas still leaves a lot to be desired.Many people do not have access to a hygienic toilet; large amounts of waste are discharged to the environment without adequate treatment, and this has been estimated as likely to have major impacts on infectious disease burden and quality of life.
The problem is an urgent one.“There is a lot of need to rehabilitate and also expand to cover additional demand,” says Ndongwe. “The problem is that the treatment plants are overloaded. They are having to treat more effluent than they were designed for.” The whole system, dating back to the 1960s, requires attention, he adds. “We are still working out precisely what needs to be done but it will be a lot. Once the master plan is ready, the situation will be much clearer.”
Because of its height above sea level, Lusaka’s water supply all has to be pumped up. Around 42 per cent of the water is abstracted from the Kafue River about 65 kilometres away and all of 200 metres below the capital’s elevation. The remainder comes from boreholes strategically placed around the city and its suburbs. “Our long term strategy is to double the amount of the surface water we take from the river, and just use the groundwater as a backup supply. In the medium term, however, we do propose to increase the number of boreholes. We are planning to drill 10 additional boreholes this year; and next year we have factored in another 10 under our budget to try to deal with water-stressed areas.”
When it was handed over to Lusaka Water, it was found that many of the existing boreholes in Chongwe were not functioning at all and there was no water treatment plant there. The completion in September this year of a $1.6 million facility finder by the Danish government development agency Danida will have a major impact on the quality of life in Chongwe, says Ndongwe, though there are still major challenges in the extensive rural areas that now fall under his control. “Since taking over Kafue and Luangwa, we have realised that there is an urgent need to rehabilitate the existing water treatment facilities there too.”
Using World Bank finance, the sedimentation plants and intake pumps at the Kafue River plant have been rehabilitated and the plant’s efficiency improved. Perhaps the most significant initiative has been the metering programme. “By the end of this year we will have installed 30,000 meters for domestic customers. This benefits them because they gain control over their water usage and costs, and it benefits us by cutting the cost of debt collection, improving our cash flow and freeing us to focus on services to existing customers and extending the service to new customers.” New IT servers have been installed to support a SCADA(supervisory control and data acquisition) system that monitors the performance and status of every reservoir, pumping station and treatment plant from a central location.
Lusaka Water & Sewerage has achieved something almost unthinkable four years ago; it has moved from loss into profit, recording a small surplus in 2009 and expecting a larger one in the current year. Remarkable things have been achieved. “About 19 areas had poor supply and we have covered almost half of them. We have also seen a growth in our business over the last four years and financially the company is getting better. If we are robust in terms of financial performance it will be easier for us to access financing in the future. My vision is to transform this company into a vibrant business that can operate on a sustainable basis and also become a world-class water utility, despite all the challenges we are facing,” says a confident Ndongwe.
Going forward he would like to develop a range of commercial opportunities, including turning waste into organic fertiliser, supplying bottled water, and microgeneration at the treatment plants.
