Veolia Water is a member of the association Fonds Solidarité Eau, which provides those most in need with targeted financial aid to help them pay their water bills. Some 59 agreements have already been signed. In each signatory district in France, Veolia Water has pledged to write off the receivables of a certain number of customers having trouble paying.
Access for all to drinking water and wastewater services is one of our century's major challenges in emerging countries. We are doing what we can to meet it, in partnership with public authorities and other stakeholders.
A global issue
Nearly one billion human beings lack access to drinking water and 2.6 billion to basic sanitation. Year after year the international community works to make access to essential water services a reality for all. In September 2000, the UN set a target to halve by 2015 the number of people without access to drinking water or sanitation, as part of its Millennium Development Goals. Committed to helping attain the regularly affirmed objectives, we are responding to a strong expectation of the governments and public authorities that outsource their water management to us, by proposing technical, commercial, legal and financial solutions tailored to local needs and the local population's capabilities and willingness to contribute.
Appropriate social engineering
Since the start of our contracts in Morocco, Gabon, Niger and India, Veolia Water has provided more than 2.5 million additional people with access to drinking water and 1.2 million with wastewater services. To that end we developed specific expertise, dubbed "ACCES" in French, involving five goals:
- Adapt services
- Capitalize on the assets in place
- Create innovative solutions
- Evaluate the impact of programs in progress
- Educate consumers about proper water use and practices
Pilot experiments
To promote access to essential services for all, we also experiment with new business models.
Bangladesh, where Grameen Veolia Water Ltd. inaugurated its first water production plant in Goamari, is one example. Created in 2008 as a joint venture of Veolia Water and the Grameen Bank founded by Professor Muhammad Yunus, 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner, it conducted an initial "social business" experiment in the field of water, for communities that previously had access only to water drawn aquifers naturally polluted with arsenic.
Other experiments are being conducted in Morocco, where since 2002 subsidized connections have linked almost half of the previously unconnected 12,000 families in Rabat, Tangier and Tetouan to public water networks. To extend and speed up subsidized connections in new districts, we are experimenting with an Output-Based Aid (OBA) subsidy pilot for the World Bank and Global Partnership for Output-Based Aid (GPOBA). OBA is paid as grants when work actually starts to connect families to public water and wastewater networks and on their level of satisfaction.
Other innovations have also been developed :
- The Sakayti system provides customized, safe access to community water for families with no drinking water connection in their house.
- Mobile agencies serve people without a customer service agency nearby. Mobile agencies travel to neighborhoods far from city centers and villages, based on a schedule set in advance with resident representatives, to meet, listen to and inform customers and allow them to take care of administrative business such as sign-up and payment of their monthly bills. This gives even remote customers without access to transportation the same customer service, without having to make a special trip.
Stronger community support
There is also a need for community support in developed countries. To help people in great financial need, Veolia Water is introducing subsidy schemes and trying to find ways to avoid cutting off service. Working with the public authority and retail customers concerned, we are creating payment solutions tailored to each situation. In France, we are acting through the housing association Fonds de Solidarité Logement, among others, and issuing "water checks."
Humanitarian action
Veoliaforce is the humanitarian arm of the Veolia Environnement Foundation. Its brief is to provide emergency humanitarian assistance, by sending experts and equipment to the stricken area in order to safeguard the water supply and prevent the outbreak of epidemics. It relies on a network of employees who volunteer both their time and expertise in order to assist those communities affected by the disaster.
