Canal cities water and wastewater : phase II institutional support project (CCII) -- interim evaluation final report

The evaluation covers the period 6/91-9/95. Due to the length of time needed to change reactive management systems to pro-active ones, few tasks have been completed. Nonetheless, all tasks have made significant progress and have been enthusiastically endorsed by project clients. These include the establishment of a Steering Committee, which has fostered cooperation between the WWDs/governorates and facilitated the negotiation of city contracts for O&M of the wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) by the SCA. The project has also ensured governorate/city ownership of the WWTPs and prepared a "tariff model" which uses the cost-of-service approach and can be used to identify and prioritize cost-saving actions. In 4/95, the SCA established separate Water Accounting units to be the focus of major revenue enhancement interventions in metering/billing/collection, financial planning, and tariff setting. The project has improved cost-effectiveness by developing hydraulic models for the water systems and by implementing a successful water conservation education program; promoted operational improvements by inducing interest in developing cross-connection control, lead elimination, and source protection programs at the SCA; organized all stores, developing inventory control systems that incorporate materials management capability; and successfully completed (and continues to implement) training-of-trainers programs in O&M. In 9/94, recognizing the difficulty of implementing the project through 7 distinct management units rather than through centralized management as originally planned, USAID modified the project to emphasize completion of the model WWD and SCA unit in Suez for replication in Ismailia and Port Said. USAID should strongly consider a project extension to effect this replication, particularly since SCA, which is generally acknowledged as the best-managed and -funded authority in Egypt"s water/wastewater sector, has, after several years working with the project contractor, embraced project-developed technologies. Completing the full package of the interventions agreed to by SCA and the contractor would be the most effective way to demonstrate these efficiency tools to the rest of Egypt. A general lesson to be drawn from this is that even under ideal circumstances institutional development projects focusing on an entire sector and serving significant municipalities should be long enough to allow not only the development and practice of new systems, but also follow-up activities, under contractor supervision, aimed at ensuring the optimal use of the powerful new systems.