The Way Forward - Voices from the Global Water Operator Partnership Alliance

The Global Water Operator Partnership Alliance (GWOPA) of UN Habitat held its first Congress in conjunction with the broad UN celebration of World Water Day on 22 March 2011 in Cape Town, South Africa. More than 150 people participated, including the development banks, national governments, public and private water operators, UN agencies, NGOs and trade unions. Click http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86h_o-oDcIQ to access the video that provides a brief overview of PSI work with the UN system, NGOs and public operators. It was compiled from interviews with participants at UN Habitat’s first congress of the Gl obal Water Operator Partnership Alliance – GWOPA, held in Cape Town South Africa 20-21 March 2011.
Background info : PUPs are partnerships between public utilities, based on solidarity rather than profit. Their purpose is to increase technical, managerial and professional capacities among the partners. Typically, there will be one utility offering assistance and a second receiving, although we are now seeing networks of public utilities combining to create support projects. These partnerships often operate within the same country (domestic PUPs), but there are a number of them between countries, for example between public utilities from Argentina and Peru, Uruguay and Bolivia, etc. PUPs partners are unions, NGOs, academics and elected officials.
In 2007, UN SG Kofi Annan appointed UN Habitat to establish a global mechanism designed to facilitate water operator partnerships, or WOPs. The WOPs came from the UN Secretary General’s Advisory Board on Water and Sanitation (UNSGAB). http://www.unsgab.org/hap.htm The WOPs were originally conceived from the Public-Public Partnership concept, also known as twinning. The debate within UNSGAB recognised that there are at least 250,000 public water and sanitation (watsan) operators in the world. Many of them achieve remarkable results in difficult circumstances. If we are to reach the MDGs, we must unleash the capacity of these operators to assist each other, in a systematic fashion. We indicated that the private sector is failing to meet the needs of the poor, and even if they had all of the money, they could not do it, as there are not enough of them.
It is important to note that the private operators can participate in WOPs, but on a non-profit basis. Any WOPs partners must sign a code of conduct which affirms the non-commercial nature of the partnership, and which supports the participation of a range of stakeholders, including trade unions and civil society.

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