In a time not so long ago, colleagues from the Dutch water operator VEI still could be found in a training room, PRV-chamber or filter with their Zimbabwean peer WaterWorX partners the City of Harare and the Bulawayo City Council.

Interview with Adriaan Mels, Regional Director Vitens Evides International (VEI), WaterWorX Coordinator, and Marjon Reiziger, Programme Manager YEP Programmes, by the YEP Programme

To achieve SDG6 - access to water and sanitation for all - partnerships are crucial.

Drinking water is vital, but it is still far from being available to everyone in the world. During World Water Day, all member states of the United Nations draw attention to the global water problem by organizing events.

From 16 to 22 March, people worldwide joined the World Water Run, a 7-day virtual run around the world in support of World Water Day. The WaterWorX parnters PDAM Sragen in Indonesia and Oasen in The Netherlands participated to mark the day of celebration and raise awareness on the importance of achieving universal access to safe drinking water.

Peer utilities of the international cooperation programme WaterWorx periodically share their knowledge with each other. Due to the pandemic, this is now usually done online, so that all partners worldwide can participate.

The Dutch partner Oasen and the Indonesian PDAM Sragen organized a webinar under the theme "How to reduce NRW in a sustainable way." After a short introduction about how the WaterWorX Programme is organized by Oasen , the Mayor of Sragen talked about the developments at the Indonesian drinking water company.

Celebrating World Water Day 2021, six authors (Leonardo van Straaten, Thorsten Reckerzügl, Anke Verheij, Christian Wiebe, Kim Andersson, Sören Rüd) backed by five organizations (Stockholm Environment Institute, GIZ, Viva con Agua, WaterWorX and EXP-Consult) present the paper Shaping the water sector to be more climate resilient - A plea for greater and wider collaboration.

The WaterWorX WOP Project between SOMAGEP-SA and Waternet (Amsterdam Water Company) financed the connection to the tap of 1,000 low-income households in the city of Bamako, Mali.

In the framework of the Kabala Project, 100,000 social connections were granted to the populations of Bamako. The cost of the social connection was 20,000 CFA francs, which is not affordable for many of the population.

Zambia has 11 water companies, called commercial utilities (CU). Since the inception of the commercial utilities, about 20 years ago, each district/province was assigned to a CU. Except for one district: Lufwanyama in the Copperbelt province. Lufwanyama did not have a CU responsible for the water provision, leaving it unattended by the responsible local council.

Achieved results, underlying approaches and contributing factors to success of 8 Non-Revenue Water (NRW) reduction interventions (2012-2019) of 19 water operators from Asia and Africa are presented in this Practice Note.