By Moses Nyirenda
Lilongwe, August 23, Mana: Lilongwe Water Board (LWB) Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Sili Mbewe said his institution is optimistic that it would manage to deal with the issue of water loss caused by illegal water connections, pipe leakages and vandalism of water supplying equipment among others.
He made the remarks on Wednesday during Project for Strengthening the Capacity of Non-Revenue Water Reduction for Lilongwe Water Board (LiSCaP) 9th Joint Coordinating Committee (JCC) meeting which was held in Lilongwe.
Mbewe said that as water board they are looking forward to reduce the issue of water loss in a range of 25 percent reaching the year 2025.
“If we are to ask our customers they will say we want 0 percent nonrevenue water, but unfortunately the reality is we cannot have zero percent across the globe even in Japan where we are learning the experiences they still have non-revenue water within 10 percent.
“For us when we look at our annual targets we are looking at least managing 35 percent but in terms of our strategic plan we are looking at 25 percent by the year 2025 specifically in June,” Mbewe said.
LWB is currently losing about 38 percent of water that it produces annually which translates to the money loss of about K15 billion, according to the CEO.
He further expressed confidence that through various interventions that are implementing which include; replacing old water supplying equipment with new ones among others would help them solve the issue of water loss.
“Under the Lilongwe Water and Sanitation Project we actually have a specific component to look at non-revenue water reduction so it looks at the whole essence of replacing the aged pipe line but again within the project we are also implementing what we are calling District Metered Areas (DMAs).
“The DMAs allow us to demarcate supply areas into manageable areas where we are able to measure how much water has gone into a particular DMA, how much water has been lost and where we have higher incidences of nonrevenue water, therefore we are very optimistic that we should be able to reduce nonrevenue water,” he said.
He also hailed Japan International Cooperation Agency (JAICA) for assisting LWB in dealing with the issue of nonrevenue water through the LiSCaP which is scheduled to phase out in December 2024.
In his comment, JAICA Chief Representative, Kazuhiro Tambara said that as JAICA they are committed to providing LWB with different support such as the latest equipment and capacity that would assist in dealing with the issue of nonrevenue water.
