Dakar, Senegal – July 6, 2007 – His Excellency Abdoulaye Diop, Minister of Finance, on behalf of the National Sanitation Agency (ONAS) formally signed a US$5.8 million grant with the World Bank’s Global Partnership on Output-Based Aid (GPOBA) to help deliver access to on-site sanitation facilities to the urban poor in Dakar, Senegal. The grant is funded by the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID) and the Netherlands’ Ministry of Development Cooperation (DGIS) under the multi-donor GPOBA, administered by the World Bank.
This project will provide affordable sanitation to over 15,000 poor households in targeted poor areas of Dakar through the installation of on-site sanitation facilities such as shower or wash basins with soak-away, or pour-flush latrines. Furthermore, the project will involve sanitation education, demand management and monitoring and verification. The subsidies provided through the GPOBA grant are for the most part disbursed to AGETIP (the implementing agency) and the local private contractors/artisans on an output-basis: payments are made after the delivery of agreed outputs, such as the installation of a working pour-flush latrine to a low-income household.
“This project builds on the success of the existing World Bank-financed Sanitation Program for Peri-urban Areas of Dakar (PAQPUD) as part of the Long Term Water Supply Project, which is providing access to sanitation services to the urban poor,” said Sylvie Debomy, the project manager. The PAQPUD project delivered over 63,000 on-site sanitation facilities between 2003 and 2005 – 3,000 more facilities two years ahead of schedule. “The GPOBA project helps to maintain the momentum achieved by the PAQPUD project, enhances the sustainability of the on-site sanitation approach in Dakar through refined targeting and outputs as well as tougher efficiency targets, and demonstrates the Government’s continued commitment to innovative solutions to help provide access to sanitation for the poor,” stated Mr. Madani Tall, World Bank Country Director for Senegal, who signed the grant on behalf of the GPOBA/World Bank.
GPOBA is a multi-donor World Bank administered trust fund whose aim to test output-based aid (“OBA”) approaches, selectively scale-up these approaches, and disseminate the lessons learned. OBA involves targeted performance-based subsidies that are disbursed only after service providers have delivered the outputs which are agreed beforehand. The outputs in this GPOBA-funded sanitation project include not only the hardware of sanitation facilities, but importantly, the software of support, education, and monitoring from independent agents, non-governmental agencies, and community-based organizations. At the same time, a willingness and ability to pay assessment was conducted for the PAQPUD which verified user contributions of about 20 to 25 percent of the cost. “This will help ensure the sustainability of the sanitation scheme, which is important for GPOBA since although our subsidies are ‘one-off’, we want to ensure that the poor have access to a continued level of service into the future,” stated Patricia Veevers-Carter, Program Manager for GPOBA.
The Director General of ONAS has reaffirmed the Government’s commitment to a competitive, transparent process in procuring contractors and working with AGETIP, the implementing agency working with ONAS, which will result in efficiency gains that will directly benefit the poor: “Through this project, we hope to reach at least 135,000 urban Senegalese. This is just the beginning of a process involving innovative financing mechanisms to help meet the Millennium Development Goals for Senegal.”
