The De­vel­op­ment Bank of Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean (CAF) is pro­vid­ing US$700,000 to sup­port the Bar­ba­dos Wa­ter Au­thor­i­ty (BWA) with the re­duc­tion of non-rev­enue wa­ter wastage.

A gov­ern­ment state­ment said that the grant will al­so as­sist in strength­en­ing the BWA’s in­fra­struc­ture for in­creased wa­ter se­cu­ri­ty across Bar­ba­dos.

“We have a pre­vi­ous loan with the BWA for US$10 mil­lion, and we have been do­ing a lot of work in this area. We al­so re­cent­ly host­ed a re­gion­al wa­ter se­cu­ri­ty con­fer­ence here in Bar­ba­dos, where we brought to­geth­er the heads of the agen­cies for wa­ter and san­i­ta­tion from across all CARI­COM coun­tries,” said CAF’s re­gion­al man­ag­er for the Caribbean, Dr. Sta­cy Richards-Kennedy, at the sign­ing cer­e­mo­ny over the last week­end.

“And so, CAF is pleased to put grant re­sources be­hind this ef­fort and to en­sure that we now go to the next step and ac­com­pa­ny the BWA and the gov­ern­ment and peo­ple of Bar­ba­dos with de­signs for im­prov­ing the in­fra­struc­ture and en­sur­ing that we go to the sec­ond phase of fund­ing.”

Prime Min­is­ter Mia Amor Mot­t­ley told the sign­ing cer­e­mo­ny that the bank had pre­pared a tech­ni­cal study for the BWA, which rec­om­mends mak­ing a change from how this coun­try ap­proach­es the man­age­ment of the net­work sys­tem and its struc­ture.

“Our re­la­tion­ship with you ex­tends not on­ly to your lend­ing, but to your pro­vid­ing grant re­sources. [It] is a ma­jor, ma­jor dif­fer­ence in the way in which…your bank has re­lat­ed to the Gov­ern­ment of Bar­ba­dos….

“And for ex­am­ple, there have been oth­er grants that have been used. When peo­ple talk about con­sul­tant ad­vi­sors, very of­ten a lot of what we have ben­e­fit­ed from has been fund­ed, not by the tax­pay­ers of Bar­ba­dos alone, but in this par­tic­u­lar in­stance, CAF has al­so been there for us with the abil­i­ty to pro­vide the grant fund­ing for tech­ni­cal re­sources to ben­e­fit the coun­try,” Mot­t­ley said.

She spoke of the BWA’s is­sue with non-rev­enue wa­ter, adding “for every gal­lon that you pump, if you lose wa­ter be­cause of a leak or…what­ev­er rea­son, it means that you are pump­ing, but you’re not earn­ing for that wa­ter be­cause it’s be­ing lost in­to the ground.

“And we have, over…the last year, placed spe­cif­ic em­pha­sis on putting the dis­trict me­ter net­work in place…to ben­e­fit from the da­ta that is nec­es­sary that will guide…the ac­tions of the Wa­ter Au­thor­i­ty with re­spect to where they have to fix, to be able to re­duce it,” she said.

Mot­t­ley said that in one area of the is­land, for every 100 gal­lons of wa­ter pumped, 42 gal­lons were be­ing lost, and there­fore, no mon­ey was be­ing earned on that wa­ter.

“This is as a re­sult of an aged in­fra­struc­ture, pre­dom­i­nant­ly, and that is why…if we don’t get our non-rev­enue wa­ter down, it means that we’re car­ry­ing costs for which we can’t earn back mon­ey. And that is why this is a crit­i­cal project to be start­ed, but equal­ly to be com­plet­ed.”