From Global Water Intelligence

The war-torn African state wants to expand private sector participation as it tackles a chronic water supply shortage following years of under-investment. A 10-year tariff freeze could prove to be a major sticking point.

The West African state of Côte d’Ivoire is planning to tender its first privately financed water treatment plant just two years after emerging from a decade of financial uncertainty driven by political crisis and civil unrest.

While Côte d’Ivoire is an old hand at PPPs (the urban water sector has successfully operated under private company Sodeci since 1959), the authorities now want to experiment with new models of private sector intervention, and the first such project is likely to be a 600,000m3/d treatment and transfer project from the town of Tiassalé on the Bandama River to the economic capital Abidjan, 120km to the south (see table above).

The plant will be implemented in two phases of 300,000m3/d each, and while the state will finance the transfer infrastructure, the WTP will be set up as an independent water producer under a BOT contract, with Sodeci as the offtaker.

Ibrahiman Berté, general director of Office National de l’Eau Potable (ONEP), the sector regulator and contracting authority, told GWI that he hopes to run a prequalification process this year and issue a final RFP in 2015, with a view to having the plant online by 2018. If the experience is positive, the model could be replicated elsewhere. The authorities are also considering private sector water performance contracts in rural areas which do not fall under Sodeci’s remit.

Abidjan’s current 225,000m3/d supply gap is largely a result of chronic underinvestment in the water sector following the outbreak of civil war in 2002, and while the imminent commissioning of the Niangon 2 and Bonoua 1 water treatment plants will alleviate the immediate supply shortfall, the country has been forced to take a longer-term view. “Abidjan is growing. If we stop with Niangon 2 and Bonoua 1, we’ll be back to a production deficit as early as 2016,” Berté told GWI.

Read more at Global Water Intelligence