Philippines - Virtual kick off meeting of the PAWD benchmarking project

01-07-2021

In 2020 the WaterWorX Performance Enhancement Water Utilities in the Philippines (PEWUP) Project signed a contract with project partner the umbrella organization Philippine Association of Water Districts (PAWD) to finance a benchmarking project. So far there was no benchmark in the Philippines and past efforts have not had the expected results because of lack of financing.

Today, June 29, 2021 a virtual meeting was organized by PAWD for the official kick-off of the “Performance Benchmarking Toolkit”, an online database to register the data of all 500+ water districts and extract reports. The methodology is based on the European Benchmarking Cooperation (EBC), which enables the Philippines to benchmark themselves against the rest of the world in the future as well.

More than 200 participants joined today’s meeting, including representatives of important stakeholders, like the regulator (Local Water Utilities Administration (LWUA), the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, the National Economic Development Authority (NEDA), Asian Development Bank (ADB), USAID, Water.org, National Water Resources Board (NWRB) and the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH), who all expressed their support for and interest in the results of the benchmark.

The representatives of the water districts who attended, were all eager to start, which is a good sign, as the success of the project of course also depends on the participation of the benchmarked organizations.

Everyone realized that today’s event is a historical landmark for the Philippine water sector. For PEWUP this is an important project in the light of the enabling environment. It is the intention to continue the support in phase 2 of WWX.

General Manager and project leader of the benchmark project Mario Villasol, presenting the Tool and the EBC methodology