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People's Republic of Bangladesh
Strengthening Poor-Inclusive Urban Water and Sanitation Service Quality Information Systems in Bangladesh
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May 2016
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GWASS
SOUTH ASIA
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The World Bank Group
Strengthening Poor-Inclusive Urban Water Supply and Sanitation (UWSS) Service Quality Information Systems in Bangladesh
(P131951)
Water and Sanitation Program
4/26/2016
This synthesis report details the process, outputs and intermediate outcomes of technical assistance (TA) to support the Government of Bangladesh in developing information systems that incentivize improvements in the quality of urban water and sanitation services through enhancing the responsiveness of water and sanitation providers in particular to poor consumers. The strategic focus was on information systems (i.e. quantitative data tools and qualitative assessments) to strengthen the incentives for the central government and local providers to focus on the quality-of-service bottlenecks (i.e. operation and maintenance, consumer satisfaction, inclusion, regulation) in key aspects of the service delivery chain (i.e. water safety, water extraction, fecal sludge management and waste water disposal) to complement the existing high levels of access to low quality water and sanitation services.
Table of Contents
Executive Summary 3
Background 5
Overview of Technical Assistance 6
Results Framework 6
Process 6
Outputs 9
Intermediate Outcomes 10
Increased Utility Responsiveness to Consumers 10
Improved Utility Viability (Target = Operating Ratio <1) 10
Improved Personnel Efficiency (Target = Staffing ratio <8 per ‘000 connections) 10
Improved Revenue Collection (Target = >70% billings collected) 10
Accounts Receivable (Target = Outstanding dues >150 days) 11
Expanded Services (Target = >40% population with piped water) 11
Services to the Poor (Target = Revenues from Low-income Consumers Increase by 100%) 12
Improved Government Capacity 12
Water Supply and Sanitation Regulatory Commission 12
Rules for the Water Act to Regulate Abstraction 12
Policies and Data on the Provision of Services to Low-Income Communities 13
Fecal Sludge Management Scorecard 13
Model By-laws for Local Governments to Control Wastewater 14
Outputs 15
Urban Water Supply: Utility Benchmarking and Consumer Surveys 15
Benchmarking to Improve Urban Water Supply Delivery in Bangladesh (2014) 15
Urban Development Assistance Map / Graphs 16
DWASA Decentralization (Benchmarking Zonal Management) Report 16
Utility Consumer Satisfaction Reports / Analysis / Forum 17
Utility Benchmarking Training Minutes, Network Reports and Exchange Visit BTORs 18
WSP / WBI Regional Water Utility Managers Training in Dhaka 19
Harmonizing the Water Act with Municipality / WASA Acts 20
Urban Sanitation: Fecal Sludge and Wastewater Management Diagnostics 21
Political Economy Analysis, Fecal Flow Diagram and Service Delivery Assessment for Dhaka 21
Low-Income Customers: Delinking WSS Services from Tenure 22
Low Income Consumer Service Improvement Plan (LICSIP) 23
Leveraging Slum Services 24
Lessons Learned 25
Recommendations 25
ANNEXURES
1. Bangladesh Water Utility Benchmarking Report
2. Urban Development Assistance Map & Graphs
3. Zonal Benchmarking Management Reports (Decentralization within DWASA)
4. Consumer Satisfaction Surveys (1 Sample of 10 Reports / Bangla Translation)
5. Water Utility Network Reports (1 Sample of 7 Reports/ Bangla Translation)
6. WSP-WBI Regional Utility Training Program (Agenda and Presentations)
7. Report on Aligning the Water Act with the Municipal / WASA Acts
8. Political Economy Analysis, Fecal Flow Diagram and Service Delivery Assessment for Dhaka
9. Low Income Consumer Service Improvement Plan (LICSIP) for DWASA
- Leveraging Slum Services: Instruments to Leverage Improved WSS Services in LICs
Abbreviations & Acronyms
ADB Asian Development Bank
BBS Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics
BDT Bangladesh Taka
BMDA Barind Multipurpose Development Authority
BTOR Back-to-Office Report
BUET Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology
BWSSRC Bangladesh Water Supply and Sanitation Regulatory Commission
CBO Community Based Organization
CSO Civil Society Organizations
DCC Dhaka City Corporation
DMA District Metered Area
DPHE Department of Public Health Engineering
DWASA Dhaka Water Supply & Sewerage Authority
DWSSP Dhaka Water Supply and Sanitation Project of the World Bank
FSM Fecal Sludge Management
IBNet International Benchmarking Network for Water Supply and Sanitation Utilities
ICT Information and Communication Technology
JICA Japan International Cooperation Agency
JMP Joint Monitoring Programme for water supply & sanitation of UNICEF & WHO
LIC Low Income Community
LICSIP Low Income Community Service Improvement Plan
LGD Local Government Division
LGED Local Government Engineering Department
LGI Local Government Institution
lpcd liters per capita per day
MLGRD&C Ministry of Local Government, Rural Development, and Cooperatives
NGO Nongovernmental organization
NoC No Objection Certificate
NRW Non-revenue water
PPP Public-private partnership
PSU Policy Support Unit
TA Technical Assistance
UNICEF United Nations International Children Emergency Fund
UP Union Parishad
WARPO Water Resource Planning Organization
WASA Water Supply and Sewerage Authority
WBI World Bank Institute
WHO World Health Organization
WSP Water and Sanitation Program
WSS Water Supply and Sanitation
USAID United States Agency for International Development
UWUN Urban Water Utilities Network
UWSS Urban Water Supply and Sanitation
Executive Summary
This synthesis report details the intermediate outcomes, outputs and process of the World Bank Water Supply and Sanitation Program Technical Assistance to Strengthening Poor-Inclusive Urban Water and Sanitation (UWSS) Service Quality Information Systems in Bangladesh (P131951).
This technical assistance (TA) supported the Government of Bangladesh to develop information systems that incentivize improvements in the quality of urban water and sanitation services through enhancing the responsiveness of water and sanitation providers in particular to poor consumers. The strategic focus was on developing information systems (i.e. quantitative data tools and qualitative assessments) to strengthen the incentives for both the central government and local providers to focus on the quality-of-service bottlenecks (i.e. operation and maintenance, consumer satisfaction, inclusion, regulation) in the service delivery chain (i.e. water safety, water extraction, fecal sludge management, and waste water disposal) to complement the existing high levels of access to low quality water and sanitation services.
Specifically, this TA contributed to the following intermediate outcomes:
(a) Increased responsiveness of urban water and sanitation service providers to consumers, in particular those in the bottom 2 quintiles:
· Quantitative: Through an expansion in the number of utilities under the quantitative benchmarking program from 11 utilities in FY08 to more than 57 utilities in FY15. In FY13/14 alone, the expansion of networks within the benchmarked 34 utilities and the extension of the program to a further 23 utilities equated to an additional 3.9 million people receiving water services from utilities where operational data is being quantitatively benchmarked.
· Qualitative: The uptake of demand-side consumer satisfaction surveys (against the utility benchmarks) by utilities including the hosting of citizen forum meetings in more than 10 municipalities in FY14/15 was instrumental in improving the accountability of utilities for the quality of their water services.
· Poor Inclusive: An additional 48,600 consumers in low income communities served through the extension of legal water connections including access to a mobile phone based redressal system and bill payment options.
(b) Improved capacity of the Government to monitor and incentivize the quality of urban water and sanitation service provision:
· Following the passage of the Water Act (2013), the Water Resource Planning Organization (WARPO), Local Government Division (LGD), Department of Public Health Engineering (DPHE) and municipalities have collaborated on the drafting of rules / by-laws for the implementation of the Water Act in urban areas.
· A Bill for the establishment of the Bangladesh Water Regulatory Commission for urban areas has been passed by the Local Government Ministry and the National Forum for Water Supply and Sanitation and sent to the Law Ministry.
· The Ministry of Local Government has established a Committee to oversee the drafting of a National Fecal Sludge Management (FSM) Framework (that will potentially include the introduction of a FSM tax to internalize the externalities of poor quality sanitation).
· The Ministry of Local Government has issued guidelines enabling the extension of water and sewerage connections into low income communities separate from the requirement for tenure security.
The major activities supported by this TA over the period from 2011-2015 have been:
· Technical assistance to 57 utilities to annually benchmark water management performance (i.e. the provision of benchmarking training, data compilation and cleaning, comparing data nationally and internationally through the International Benchmarking Network for Water Supply and Sanitation Utilities (IBNet), networking workshops and peer learning visits).
· Technical support to 10 pourashavas to undertake consumer satisfaction surveys (i.e. develop the questionnaires, train local enumerators, collate & analyze the data, compare this demand side results against supply side benchmarking results, conduct public meetings between elected representatives, utility staff and consumers).
· Analysis of fecal sludge management in Dhaka (i.e. the conducting of the Political Economy Analysis, Fecal Flow Diagram calculations, Service Delivery Assessment as part of the global study on fecal sludge management and consolidating World Bank feedback on the draft of a national Fecal Sludge Management Framework developed by the Government).
· Technical support in water utility reform management processes (i.e. hosting of a South Asia regional utility managers workshop bringing together global and local experiences of utility management reform; the conducting of a detailed technical assessment for Dhaka Water and Sewerage Authority (DWASA) on the options for the decentralization of management autonomy and the strengthening of management accountability through the zonal benchmarking of service delivery performance).
· Analytical support to the Ministry of Local Government in the Implementation of the Water Act (i.e. local consultations, workshops, analysis and recommendations to ensure that the rules and by-laws for the implementation of the recently passed Water Act (2013) are aligned with the Local Government Acts (2009), the Water and Sewerage Authority Acts (1996) and the draft Water and sanitation Regulatory Commission Bill (2016)).
· Analysis of the options for extending water and sanitation services to low income communities (i.e. support to DWASA in the assessment of the existing water and sanitation service delivery status in Low Income Communities (LICs) and the development of a Low Income Customer Service Improvement Plan (LICSIP) including the costed public investment requirements. For small paurashavas, this included an assessment of the options for leveraging water and sanitation service delivery improvements in LICs).
Follow-up recommendations for this TA are:
· the establishment of the Bangladesh Water Supply and Sanitation Regulatory Commission (BWSSRC) to institutionalize the incentives for water utility benchmarking.
· the deployment of the ‘Service Level Benchmarking (SLB) Connect’ mobile application (http://www.slbconnect.in/) developed with TA support in India to systematize the interrogation of ‘supply side’ utility benchmarking data with ‘demand side’ consumer feedback against the same performance indicators.
· to explore the costs / benefits of investing in primary wastewater treatment plants to treat the outfalls of the storm water drains that carry almost all of the fecal waste in Dhaka.
· to interrogate kW.hr electricity consumption data from all sewage pump stations and treatment plants prior to considering any investment in the expansion of any sewerage system.
· to explore the instruments that government can deploy to leverage those exercising ownership rights over low income community (LIC) land and housing assets to also bear the financing liability for the investments in water and sanitation asset improvements necessary to meet specific quality of service standards.
Background
1. Bangladesh has made significant progress towards achieving the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 7 targets for both improved water supply and sanitation access of the Bangladesh population. The recent WHO-UNICEF Joint Monitoring Program (JMP) 2015 shows that 98% of the population has access to a protected source while 87% of the population has access to an improved water supply. While only 1% of the population currently practices open defecation, 61% of the population has access to improved sanitation facilities, another 28% and 10% of the population respectively has access to shared or unimproved sanitation facilities[1].
2. While access has increased substantially, there are still significant challenges if Bangladesh is going to ensure safe, affordable, reliable and sustainable services for all. For sanitation, while there has been a significant movement in Bangladesh from ‘open defecation’ towards ‘fixed point defecation,’ the quality of sanitation coverage is an emerging area of concern, with over 40% of all latrines classified as ‘unimproved’ according to the MICS 2012-13. For water supply, while access to a protected source is almost universal, severe quality issues mean that only 34.6% of households consume water which meets both the Bangladesh standard for arsenic (<=50 ppb) and E. coli (<=1 cfu/100 ml). [2]
3. With regard to urban service provision, piped water supply reaches only 32% of the population1 (and only a third or 102 of the 308 Pourashavas), while the growing majority of the urban population relies on hand pumps for drinking water. With the intermittent, unreliable and questionable safety of piped water supplies, most households that are connected to piped water are forced to treat this water for drinking or continue to drink water from hand pumps. Urban sanitation is also largely comprised of on-site sanitation with access to basic and improved sanitation improving for the poorest segment of the population but still lagging behind the level of access of the richest quintile of the population. Across the urban centers of Bangladesh, there is no systematic excreta disposal and treatment system. Only Dhaka has a sewerage system serving only 25% of the city but where almost all of the effluent, the solid and liquid waste is transferred to low lying areas, canals and rivers with little or no treatment[3].