Non-revenue Water Performance Based Contracts

The problem

Water utilities in the developing world lose 45 million cubic meters of water daily, enough to serve 200 million people. This loss of non-revenue water (NRW) prevents utilities from improving services or expanding access. Sometimes, high NRW leads to water rationing which often causes contamination of the network and unsafe drinking water.

How we helped

Castalia co-authored the World Bank published operational manual The Use of Performance-Based Contracts for Nonrevenue Water Reduction: Output of the Global Program on Developing Good PBC Practices for Managing NRW.

As the contracted Technical Secretariat for the World Bank, we facilitated annual meetings of NRW experts, developed discussion papers on optimizing NRW reduction and designing PBCs, created a country/utility screening tool, designed standardized reporting indicators, profiled different scenarios and potential options for utilities, wrote operational guides, developed a training curriculum, and summarized successful cases.

Impact

If NRW could be reduced by half, 90 million more people would gain access to water. Current customers would likely have improved service quality, and water utilities would gain significant self-generated cashflow by reducing NRW.