The Ministry of Infrastructure (Mininfra) plans to give water and sanitation priority if its Budget is approved, Prof. Silas Lwakabamba has said.

Prof. Lwakabamba was presenting the ministry’s 2013/2014 Budget Estimates and Medium Term Expenditure Plan (MTEF) to Parliament’s Budget and National Patrimony Standing Committee on Monday. 

Mininfra’s 2013/14 draft Budget allocation totals Rwf378 billion. The approved budget last year (2012/13) was Rwf262b.

Prof. Lwakabamba said one "quick action in Mininfra’s mandate is to completely reshape the Energy, Water and Sanitation Authority from what it is now, to a new format of EWSA in a very short period.”

Water and sanitation is a top priority in the ministry’s current Budget Framework, with Rwf20.5b allocated for the sector.

Key deliverables

The minister said with this amount, key deliverables will include constructing new rural piping (400 kilometres), rehabilitating rural piping (500 kilometres) and constructing 1,000 springs.

He told MPs that presently, EWSA has both a commercial arm and a development arm yet this is not a realistic arrangement.

"If you look at countries around the world, they don’t do that. They separate development arm from the commercial arm. If you look at the budget we have here, you see that there is an imbalance between water and energy. There are about five or six times more of energy than water, yet water, as we say, is life. You can miss light but you can’t go without water,” Prof. Lwakabamba said.

"It is very important that we try to find a balance, and this is something that we are going to look at when we are re-shaping EWSA. We have a team working on it.”

The latest attention put on water does not mean the country’s ambitious energy and fuel project is swept under the carpet.

Under EWSA’s proposed Budget Expenditure, fuel and energy has Rwf157 billion with key deliverables to include construction of power generation plants (80MW), construction of power transmission, electricity distribution (100,000 household), and construction of biogas digesters (2,300 plants). EWSA’s administrative and support services will get Rwf19 billion.

Even so, the minister said government’s target of 100 per cent access to energy and water by 2017 is too high compared to the available budget.