Water Supply

The main objective of the assignment is to prepare Feasibility Studies and detailed designs for water supply systems (water abstraction, treatment and distribution) and sanitation improvements in the municipals Baucau, Lospalos, Same and Viqueque. The project ensures that more people enjoy an improved supply of drinking water and sanitation facilities in Timor-Leste, contributing to reducing the high incidence of water and poor sanitation related diseases, particularly in children under 5. By the end of the project, safe and reliable water supply will be provided to the four municipal towns, and all households will have improved hygienic toilets as well as toilets available in public places.

A Financial and Contract Management Unit, established at the Ministry of Energy and Water (MINEA) and responsible for monitoring, managing, and controlling the implementation of the projects, will engage the services of a Technical Assistance of the Instituto Regulador dos Serviços de Electricidade e de Água (IRSEA). The main goal is to assist the IRSEA in defining a rigorous regulatory framework, as well as in developing its capacity to fulfil its responsibilities as the water and sanitation regulatory authority. The project will include Technical Assistance, organizational structure, staffing and skill definition, development of water and sanitation specification of regulatory instruments, design and development of an information database, training and capacity building, beneficiary assessement, and design an IEC (information, education and communication) strategy and practices.

The National Water and Sanitation Information System (SINAS) started being established in 2007 and is a system which is based on the collection and management of data at local level. An information flow is defined which allows for the aggregation of data at central level, the production of further information at central level such as maps and reports, and the return of information at each level (e.g. district, province). The actual database is defined perfectly in terms of information flow, and the only point that is not satisfactory in the actual system is the amount of error that is caused by the manual collection of data by using paper and then transcribing on computer with high risk of introducing error. Within this context, this assignment is focused mainly on the data collection step of the process and on the hardware issues. For that reason, the envisaged final output of the data collection process at local level will be an Excel file as it is presently, in order to maintain the existing workflow, i.e. the resulting Excel file from this process shall be used within the existing methodologies of the SINAS platform. The proposed solution for data collection shall consisted of android tablet for field data collection, and desktop tool for downloading collected data and generating excel files.

The Project, funded by MCA, designed a planning tool that allows defining and scheduling the necessary interventions for the development of water supply and sanitation systems and services for the 151 cities and towns. The Plan developed the vision, objectives, technical solutions and management, the preliminary estimate of investments, estimated investments and recommendations for implementation and monitoring.

The Technical Assistance provided contributed decisively to the implementation by the National Water Directorate of PRONASAR and to the achievement of the outlined goals, namely: strengthening of the planning culture, strategy design, planning and performance monitoring, macro-management, strengthening of decentralization and deconcentration of functions, sustainability of infrastructures and increased efficiency and performance.