Sierra Leone’s Guma Valley Water Company Benchmarks with NWSC

What the report says

A delegation from Sierra Leone’s Guma Valley Water Company has started a benchmarking visit to Uganda’s National Water and Sewerage Corporation (NWSC) in a bid to learn practices that could improve water services in Freetown. The group is led by Managing Director Ing. Mariwan Kallon, according to Nile Post, and the programme focuses on comparing operational and management approaches across the utility sector.

The visit covers water production and distribution, revenue collection, customer service, asset and network management, and efforts to reduce non-revenue water. It also includes sessions on GIS, infrastructure planning, billing, laboratory operations, meter services and wastewater and faecal sludge management. Field visits and technical presentations are part of the exchange.

Nile Post reported that the delegation is particularly interested in NWSC’s methods for leak detection, meter management, serving low-income communities and improving customer relations. The team is also expected to observe the utility’s communication and accountability practices through an NWSC Baraza forum. These areas matter because they can help utilities improve efficiency, recover costs and maintain public trust.

Guma Valley Water Company supplies Greater Freetown and the wider Western Area. The article said its work links to the Freetown Water and Aquatic Environment Revamping Project, which aims to strengthen water supply and sanitation infrastructure. More broadly, utility benchmarking visits like this are common in the sector when operators seek practical lessons from peers facing similar service-delivery challenges.