Dec 2023-Mar 2024 Baseline Survey of Water Users Associations
The main purpose of the assignment is to provide the WB team with updated and reliable information and analysis of the existing 6 Water User Associations (WUAs) in Armenia. The analysis will help WB in designing activities and estimating the costs of WUA support program for five pilot WUAs.
The challenges that the WUAs face are of various character – governance, financial, regulatory, and/or technical, therefore to identify main constrains and needs, as well as strengths of 6 Armenian WUAs, an objective evaluation of the current situation has to be carried out, along with a clear set of recommendations that the World Bank project might consider for implementation for WUAs in future.
Particularly, the study questions may include but not limit to the following:
- What are the existing human and technical capacity of WUAs?
- What are the water resource planning capacities?
- What capacity is in place to for sound financial management and what are the improvement needs?
- How legislation, normative regulations are being followed and what are the challenges in that aspect?
- How can performance of WUAs be optimized, e.g. through digitization of some functions?
- What is the water users’ understanding on the cost formulation?
As a result, the Urban Foundation will provide detailed analysis of survey findings. It will help each of the target WUAs to formulate their longer-term strategic goal and institutional, technical financial milestones that will cohesively lead to the achievement of those goals. Apart from summarizing the findings, the study will come up with recommendations as to how the identified institutional, governance, technical and financial management gaps can be addressed, what investments will be needed and what is the estimated cost for their improvement.
Funding: World Bank
Implementer: The Urban Foundation for Sustainable Development
Beneficiaries: 6 WUAs in Armenia
