Presenting the activity report, Nani Jawara, the managing director of NAWEC, explained that in terms of transmission and distribution, it has always been a challenge and will continue to be a challenge.
“The network is really old and we are making efforts but in 2020 not much effort has been made for the fact that we were hoping that some of this project would have kick-started in 2020. But unfortunately, the contracts of those projects were not signed at the time. In 2020, most of the activities that were undertaken were mainly from NAWEC’s budget,” he told deputies.
“We did some rehabilitation of the network by replacing some of the contractors. We have done some interventions in installing some new transformers in areas where we were experiencing low voltage as a result of increase in demand. This has helped us to reduce our technical losses,” Mr Juwareh explained.
Director Jawara dilated that “as part of laws reduction efforts we have also constituted a team responsible for going after people who tamper with our electricity or water meters, those who do illegal connections that activity has been on as we speak,” he said.
“In 2020, NAWEC was still faced with a lot of challenges when it comes to water supply; meeting the demand of our customers until today or even worse as a result of the level of urbanization,” he said. “The population growth within Greater Banjul Area (GBA) is causing a lot of delay in our services delivery when it comes to water supply. The main supply in 2020 was the signing and the implementation of India line up credit which is a 22.5 million dollar project. This project gave birth to drilling of new boreholes and those boreholes are in operation and the project is commissioned.”
According to Mr Juwareh, in 2020, the customer services together with the rest of the departments within the company were very busy with the implementation of IMS which he said has always been a challenge.
“In the same year, the department conducted a lot of activities under the IMS system, though we had some setbacks during the implementation for the fact that the data collection was not fully completed and as such; the activities were not fully completed in 2021 and 2022, ad during this period most of the activities were covered.”
“In terms of governance, the board of NAWEC in 2021 were able to approve the new structure for NAWEC because 2020 was the highlight of NAWEC’s transformative agenda,” he disclosed, citing that the board of directors had approved a new structure for NAWEC where “we were able to recruit new group directors and the structure has also evolved over time because in 2020, we had about 9 directorates.”
“The 24 hours was really a bit challenging for us to provide 24 hours electricity supply, but relatively most places were enjoying good supplies from 2020 and in terms of providing access. The people of kiang were also very happy in 2020 because for the first time they had access to electricity through the support we got from Indian line credit.”
