Water utility to overhaul staff to revamp operations

The Water and Sanitation Corporation Limited (Wasac) will today advertise 117 open job positions to seek expertise it needs to improve its services. James Sano, the WASAC chief executive, said this while appearing before a parliamentary Standing Committee on Social Affairs to talk about the management of personnel at WASAC. The utility agency is a splinter created by Cabinet two years ago to improve the efficiency of water and sanitation service delivery in the country as an independent entity. Previously, water agency was under the Energy, Water and Sanitation Authority, but after the splinter, WASAC emerged as a separate entity from Energy Development Corporation Limited. Sano said the recruitment of new staff, whose advertisement will bepublished, today, on the company’s web site, is part of the reforms that the agency has embarked on to improve its services. “There are a lot of things we have to do as part of reforms at Wasac, including setting up a new structure, a new board and appointing new staff,” Sano told Saturday Times shortly after appearing before the legislators. “We need to improve the services offered by the company and one way we are doing it is the recruitment of all the new staff that we need.” Sources close to the recruitment process at Wasac told Saturday Times that the jobs to be advertised today will seek expertise of people from different sectors, from auditors to accountants and IT specialists to engineers, among others. “Occupying 117 positions will definitely require different types of experts,” a source familiar with the recruitment process at Wasac said. On top of 117 positions whose occupants will have to be new recruits, Wasac will also internally advertise 449 positions. Numbers for service delivery? Sano said Wasac will stop hiring after it has at least 760 full-time employees, which is a sufficient number of staff that the utility agency needs to give what its officials call “excellent services” to water subscribers in the country. Officials at Wasac have, in recent days, promised to give a better service of water supply to Rwandans while also improving their ability to collect revenues from water sales. While the 2013 Auditor-General’s report indicated that the then Energy Water and Sanitation Authority had 42.38 per cent of the water produced and distributed, worth Rwf10.5 billion, not billed, Sano said the trend will be reversed, thanks to the use of technology for electronic billing and payment. In February, Wasac launched a plan to turn to electronic payment systems, like mobile money, Internet and mobile banking, to improve revenue collection from water consumers. At the launch of the plan, Sano said the electronic payment system will enable the utility to bill up to 98 per cent of their customers, up from the previous 59 per cent of the users they were able to bill previously.

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Water utility to overhaul staff to revamp operations