17 Feb 2025

Government has put in place measures to reduce water wastage through leakages.

This was revealed by the assistant Minister of Water and Human Settlement, Mr Motsamai Motsamawhen responding to a question in Parliament recently.

Mr Motsamai said an operational strategy which included execution of emergency network rehabilitation and expansion projects in areas with the highest water loss such as Kanye and Molepolole was ongoing. 

In Maun, the project had been completed. He said the operational strategy entailed decentralisation of Water Utilities Corporation (WUC) operations to improve accountability and agility of resources across the country.

Furthermore, he said WUC had engaged external contractors to support its network maintenance teams and was also developing its digital operational capability by installing digitalised equipment in its network to monitor pressures and determine losses in real time citing Smart Prepaid Water Metering as one of the phases of the development.

Mr Motsamai said the total amount of water supplied nationwide amounted to an average of 11 000 million litres per month serving customers through over 500 000 metered connections which he noted was a combined supply from boreholes and dams.

He said 48 per cent of the water was not billed and therefore no revenue was generated or cost of production and treatment recovered from it by WUC.

He said unbilled water was categorised into two, authorised consumption where water was supplied for free to communities or customers through tankers or bowsers, stand alone tanks and public stand pipes.

Another category was water lost due to inefficiency of the customer meters including the faulty and the ones operating beyond their useful life.

Furthermore, he said water was also lost through theft, vandalism of infrastructure and contamination resulting in flushing of pipelines as well as leakages from the water supply and distribution networks.

He said about 34 per cent of the non-revenue water was estimated to be water supplied for free to communities and lost through leakages and theft.

“This is an equivalence of 1 795 million liters per month. It should be noted that the amount of water lost through leakages cannot be accurately measured but instead it is estimated based on various parameters. Water is lost through leaks on tanks, pipelines and on meter connection points before the customer meters,” he said.

He said areas like Gaborone, Francistown and Lobatse still had old asbestos pipes within their distribution network as primary lines. 

“These have long surpassed their usage lifespan and are prone to failure due to increased pressures in the network to support population growth and high rise buildings,” he said.

He further said failure of these pipelines led to huge water losses, noting that vandalism of pipes for livestock watering on highly pressurised large diameter transmission pipelines resulted in high volume of water losses when broken.

Mr Motsamai was responding to a question from Tonota MP, Mr Galefele Sedombo who wanted the assistant minister to brief Parliament on the amount of water wasted through leakages countrywide and to state measures in place to address the problem. ENDS