Access to safe and resilient water and sanitation services is crucial towards achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as emphasised at the G20 Summit in 2024. To this end, Germany, in cooperation with other partners, announced the transformative Urban Water Catalyst Initiative (UWCI) at the UN 2023 Water Conference to emphasize the critical role of water operators in driving sustainable economic and social development and towards the achievement of the human rights to water and sanitation.
The Urban Water Catalyst Initiative aims to promote reliable and safe urban WASH services by significantly increasing the operational and financial performance of water utilities (“turnaround”) from the global South and their access to financing for sustainable investments in environmental-sound, climate-resilient and socially inclusive drinking water and sanitation infrastructure.
The UWCI and the implementing instrument, the UWCI Turnaround Facility, will be officially launched at the GWOPA Congress in Bonn. Therefore this session is targeting to provide a technical insight to the approach of the initiative and how it links to water operator partnerships.
The event will start with opening remarks by the BMZ Deputy Director who will introduce the initiative. Afterwards the WOP of KUWASA, Tanzania and Hamburg Wasser will present their view on how their WOP can provide peer-to-peer support to drive financial independence. This input will lead into the panel discussion with key experts from the sector from the utilities, regulators, development banks from Colombia and KfW from Germany to share their views on the initiative and how it can contribute to the turnaround of utilities towards financial independence, which will allow key infrastructure investments on access (SDG 6) and be climate resilient (SDG 13). The session will end with a Q&A from the participants and closing remarks from a member of the sounding board of UWCI to share a stakeholder perspective on the initiative.