Nyewasco basks in continental glory for service delivery

Nyeri Water and Sewerage Company (Nyewasco). [Courtesy]

Nyeri Water and Sewerage Company (Nyewasco) has been ranked as the best-performing water service provider in Eastern and Southern Africa.

The award was issued by the Eastern and Southern Africa Water and Sanitation (Esawas) Regulators Association, a network of water supply and sanitation regulators that seeks to promote effective water supply and sanitation regulation through regional cooperation.

"This was based on three water utility performance indices (WUPI) components, including quality of services, economic efficiency, and operational sustainability," said the regional lobby in its report announcing the ranking.

The company attributed the achievement to the support of its customers and other stakeholders.

According to Esawas, five utilities were ranked based on their latest reports for the 2021/2022 financial year.

These were WASAC from Rwanda, which ranked the best of the regionally benchmarked utilities; Nyeri WSP from Kenya, Eastern WSC (EWSC) from Zambia, Iringa WSSA from Tanzania and Blantyre Water Board (BWB) from Malawi. Lesotho and Zanzibar did not participate as they only have national utilities, while Uganda does not rank its water and sewerage providers.

For Mozambique, the exercise of ranking the utilities at the country level was not completed by the time of preparation of the report.

Esawas has been conducting the benchmarking exercise for large utilities within the region since 2013/2014.

The report noted that Nyewasco maintained good performance in metering ratio and recorded the highest and most acceptable performance of 51.3 per cent in sewerage service coverage, among all the utilities.

"However, the utility needs to concert more efforts to improve Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) with low performance, particularly hours of supply, which is tied to the high non-revenue water and low billing," the report stated.