The assignment was to assist Water Services Regulatory Board (WASREB) enforce its regulatory mandates which include to refine, strengthen and enforce the legal and regulatory frame work governing the provision of water services by WSBs and WSPs; promote the commercial sustainability of WSBs and WSPs; improve the institutional capacity of WASREB to regulate water service provision; facilitate the development of an enabling policy environment for water service provision; facilitate effective information and communication on water services and enhance collaboration between WASREB and other relevant institution.

To accomplish this assignment we undertook the following activities;

• Assessed the levels of adherence to the provision of the licence conditions for WSBs with specific bias to the WSB’s arrangement with Water Service Providers; legalization of small scale service providers; management of bulk water provision in their areas of jurisdiction; management of sewerage treatment and disposal; facilities provision, management and development; existence and management of contingency funds; process of facility development and procurement; adherence to standards in design, construction and operation and maintenance; and level of disaster preparedness with respect to drought, flood, pollution and water borne epidemic
• Customer management, satisfaction and complaints covering customer complaints procedure in place; customer complaints resolution rate in license area; and adequacies of customer complaints redress mechanism
• Tariffs operating within the WSBs and their WSPs by in which we assessed the establishment of applicable tariff for its agent and level of adherence to the Regulatory board tariff guidelines; and adherence to application of gazette tariff in the board area
• Adherence to business plan
• Assessment of the monitoring and enforcement in place by reviewing the regularity on inspections; follow up on orders issued and issuance of any penalties against WSPs and monitoring of WSP compliance with guidelines
• Assessed the levels of adherence to provisions of the Services Provision Agreement (SPA) on reporting regime for WSPs with special regard to water quality and effluent monitoring guideline; human resource practice and code of conduct as guided by corporate governance guideline and the human resource guideline; and arrangement between small scale providers within are of a WSP
• Assessed the extent of compliance with remuneration and financial arrangement by the WSPs by checking on the customer tariffs; allocated services provider income; compliance with payment of licensee administration fees and level of arrears; compliance with payment of regulatory fees and level of arrears; reporting of subsidies; and financial arrangement of handling revenue
• Asset maintenance, management and development compliance with asset maintenance and management of good practice; process of asset development; and process of delegated work
• Assessed customer management and capacity through checking on existence of and adequacy of customer contract; strategy of monitoring of UFW; strategy of dealing with illegal connections; monitoring of stand pipes and water kiosks; process of customer complaints and compensation and adequacy; process of handling customer disputes; and how customers receive information affecting them
• Assessed the planning mechanism in place through checking the existence of business plan and inter-linkages with licensee; existence of service plan needs and whether communicated to licensee; strategy of meeting minimum service level (MSL) and current level of attainment against targeted; and process of preparing budget and whether current budget discussed and agreed with licensee; and
• Finally we assessed the reporting and adequacy of reports by the WSPs by checking whether all reports in SPA are submitted on time; and level of record keeping and capacity to do so.