Water Safety Plans Implementation in West Africa

Burkina Faso, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Senegal, Sierra Leone

This project aimed to improve water supply safety through Water Safety Plans implementation. It is was a low-cost intervention based on IWA's assessment and successful achievements. Project outcomes included the installation of new infrastructure and equipment, improvements to treatment process efficacy, establishment of customer awareness programs and setting up of a new IT documentation system. The project implementation was successfully completed and the overall assessment of the project implementation was satisfactory. Project Outputs: 1. A total of 170 trained staff on WSP Development and Implementation from utilities, government ministries and NGOs within Burkina Faso, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Senegal, and Sierra Leone. 2. WSP Baseline report for GWCL (see annex 17). The report is a result of a rapid baseline assessment that was done to find out what GWCL is already doing in regard to WSP, and more broadly to understand current drinking water quality i.e. the main issues the utility is facing. 3. 4 Water Safety Plans for GWCL, SEG, SDE and ONEA were successfully developed. 4. 2 WSP site visits in Saint Louis (Senegal) and Dabola (Guinea) for SEG, SDE and ONEA. The WSP site visits demonstrated the improved understanding of water safety plans by the various members of the WSP teams participating in the visits. 5. Two French speaking international experts on WSP reviewed the WSP drafts that were produced by SDE, SEG and ONEA and provided comments for improvement. 6. Three technical notes detailing the selected low - cost interventions for each of the three utilities (SDE, SEG and ONEA). 7. Implementation of low-cost WSP interventions at SDE, SEG and ONEA. PROBLEMS AND DELAYS: The outbreak of Ebola in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone hampered the beginning of the project for over 2 years in the case of Sierra Leone and Liberia. The political situation in Burkina Faso also delayed the scheduled WSP site visit given the uncertainty, the WSP site visit was moved to Guinea and was carried out in Dabola. As a result of the delays, GVWC and LWSC were not able to complete their WSP development process. They both set up multi-disciplinary WSP teams that were by their respective management. Both submitted to IWA basic drafts of their WSPs but the process of improving the drafts has been slow due to delays in communication from the WSP teams. IWA continues to be available for technical support to the teams and is constantly following up and encouraging the teams to go ahead with the development process.