$3B owed by customers to GWI

The Guyana Water Incorporated (GWI) did not see a profit in 2019, and one of the contributing factors was the fact that customers owe a whopping $3 billion. While announcing their performance review for this year, the utility company would have recorded its total expenditure for 2019 at $12 billion.
While there was an increased revenue of over $5.1 billion, Managing Director, Dr Richard Van-West Charles informed that this figure was influenced by the usage of water from unmetered persons as well.
“We’re not in a profit as yet because we still have an outstanding debt of about $3 billion for customers who haven’t paid. If you look at our collections, what is happening is that 70 per cent of our collections are coming from our metered customers and the rest from the unmetered. But in terms of water usage, a larger amount of water is used by the unmetered customers, compared to that of the metered,” the Managing Director said on Tuesday as he gave a breakdown of the numbers.
Van-West Charles said that until these matters are rectified, it will be difficult for the company to see a profit. As such, metering all of its customers is one of the steps towards ensuring equity.
“It is imperative for us to ensure that there is equity in the system by metering every customer. And it does two things – we have more inflows for us to do much more but in essence, the level of service in the system will improve significantly.”
Nevertheless, the net loss for January to November was reduced by more than 40 per cent when compared to the same period the previous year. Gross income, on the other hand, was increased by 14.4 per cent or $845.6 million.
For 2019, GWI performed 66,000 water tests throughout the country in keeping with standards set out by the World Health Organisation (WHO). As per global compliance, heavy metal testing was required in the hinterland communities. The water quality parameters tested are based on pH, turbidity, iron content, colour, residual chlorine, aluminium and salinity. On average, the water company shared that the water supplied to customers were 95 to 100 per cent in line with the WHO health-based guidelines.
The access to hinterland communities rose to 85 per cent and 28 wells were drilled in communities.
For the entire year, 6580 meters were installed, and the cover is now 53.2 per cent which amounts to 91,372 accounts.
For the first half of 2020, GWI is looking to cut costs by reducing the use of alum and lime by 50 per cent.