The Ghana Water Company Limited (GWCL) has said it has put measures in place to ensure that it prevents significant losses in future.

Stanley Martey, the director of communications for GWCL said although globally, every water industry makes losses, the GWCL has implored some “mechanisms” to deal with the challenge.

Speaking to Beatrice Adu, Martey said, “when it comes to our [GWCL], it is something that we have been working on for a very long time and it is not because we’re requesting for a proposal now but, we have been leveraging on technology, deploying a lot of mechanisms to enable us to reduce the loses.”

“In every water industry globally, there’s an acceptable loss range between 20 and 25% but, ours [GWCL] now go beyond 25%. In 2017, it was around 54%, currently, as I speak, it is around 40 and 45%. We’re still working hard to ensure that we reduce it further and with our vision of becoming a world-class utility, we can also fall within the range that the world-class utility fall. So, we’re working around the clock to ensure this is done,” he said.

Investing in the water industry

Martey further added that “we need to invest more and we’re investing into new meters, we’re investing into zonal meters, investing into bulk meters and even domestic meters. Most customers will confirm that we have changed their old meters into new smart digital meters and that we expect that they’ll read accurately.”

The state-owned enterprises conundrum

The Ministry of Finance recently revealed that State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) reported a GHC5.3 billion loss in their operations in the 2020 fiscal year.

The report named GWCL as topping the list of non-performing state-owned enterprises with a loss of Ghc938 million. GWCL, COCOBOD and Ghana Airports Company Limited, made a combined loss of over Ghc1.5 billion.