The Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty (WASA) has signed a $3.8 mil­lion con­tract with a Span­ish com­pa­ny to im­prove its ser­vice pro­vid­ed to con­sumers. The util­i­ty has al­so signed an agree­ment with a Ugan­dan util­i­ty com­pa­ny worth more than $1 mil­lion to train WASA per­son­nel in man­age­ment strate­gies and im­prov­ing or­gan­i­sa­tion per­for­mance. On Jan­u­ary 26, WASA, fol­low­ing ap­proval of its board of di­rec­tors, en­tered in­to an agree­ment val­ued at US$594,280 (TT$3,833,106) with Span­ish firm Aquagest So­lu­tions (a sub­sidiary of Ag­bar), for the pro­vi­sion of con­sul­tan­cy ser­vices for the de­sign, prepa­ra­tion and pre­sen­ta­tion of an op­er­a­tional trans­for­ma­tion plan for the util­i­ty. This was said in a state­ment is­sued by WASA on Fri­day.

"The project is be­ing ex­e­cut­ed over a four-month pe­ri­od, dur­ing which time Aquagest So­lu­tions will con­duct wa­ter and waste­water project au­dits in ac­cor­dance with WASA's strate­gic goals, re­view the or­gan­i­sa­tion's process­es and analyse se­lect­ed busi­ness mod­els to de­ter­mine the best mod­el for the or­gan­i­sa­tion," the au­thor­i­ty said. The Aquagest So­lu­tions arrange­ment was an­nounced by WASA chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer Gan­ga Singh on Jan­u­ary 25, a day be­fore the for­mal sign­ing, at the launch of the Wa­ter and Waste­water Sec­tor Ad­vi­so­ry Com­mit­tee and the es­tab­lish­ment of WASA as a Work­force As­sess­ment Cen­tre. Both ini­tia­tives re­sult­ed from a col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween WASA and the Na­tion­al Train­ing Agency.

Apart from the agree­ment reached with Aquagest for the pro­vi­sion of an op­er­a­tional trans­for­ma­tion plan, the au­thor­i­ty in Au­gust 2011, signed a mem­o­ran­dum of un­der­stand­ing with the Na­tion­al Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Cor­po­ra­tion (NWSC) of Ugan­da to al­low for col­lab­o­ra­tion on per­for­mance im­prove­ment ini­tia­tives and ca­pac­i­ty build­ing. This is ex­pect­ed to re­sult in an agree­ment be­ing signed with NWSC for the de­vel­op­ment of a per­for­mance im­prove­ment plan for WASA that in­cludes staff train­ing, de­vel­op­ment of a de­cen­tral­i­sa­tion strat­e­gy and the de­vel­op­ment of suc­ces­sor an­nu­al plans. The project spans a 14-month pe­ri­od, be­gin­ning this month, and is be­ing car­ried out at a cost of US$309,325 (TT $1,961,120), WASA said.