Training and Capacity Building for the Water and Wastewater Sector in Iran

The training will be carried out in Iran together with the Power and Water University of Technology of Tehran

and consist of 59 one-week courses in the fields of water supply and wastewater technology, operation and maintenance, management and finance.

The project, financed by the Iranian Government, aims to ensure that professionals working for the water and wastewater companies will be better prepared to face increasing challenges.

The training will specifically focus on topics such as water demand management, design of innovative water and sanitation systems, integrated water management, emergency planning and response, environmental assessment, operation and maintenance of water treatment plants.

The assignment will conclude with an Expert Group Meeting, which will draft the agenda for continuous Human Resources Development in the Iranian water and wastewater sector beyond this project.

Currently, sixty companies are responsible for the provision of water and wastewater services to the Iranian people.

Evenly spread over Iran’s thirty provinces, each province has one urban and one rural water and wastewater company. All water and wastewater companies are supervised by the Ministry of Energy, under the secretariat of the National Water and Wastewater Engineering Company (NWWEC).

The water and wastewater sector in Iran is facing a multitude of problems. Almost everyone in urban Iran has access to safe potable water (98%), while in rural areas about 61% of the population has access. However, the coverage of wastewater services is substantially lower. In rural areas there is practically no provision of wastewater services (0.5%), while in urban areas 20% has access to wastewater services.

In particular the ongoing population growth provides a substantial challenge to contain or even increase coverage rates. The government of Iran has acknowledged this and has embarked on an ambitious plan to improve the water and wastewater provision in the coming years.

In urban areas more than 11 million people need to be connected to a wastewater system in the next 5 years. In rural areas about 5 million people will need access to water services in the coming 5 years, and another million need to be connected to a rural wastewater system.

The project at hand is instrumental in the sense that it aims to conduct a concise human resource development effort and capacity building and training within a relatively limited time.

There are currently 38000 employees spread over 60 companies in the Iranian water and wastewater sector, the main target group for the training effort proposed by this project is the 15% that have an education at the Bachelor level or higher. This group of about 6000 people will most likely have management responsibilities and should be able to guide their colleagues in implementing newly acquired skills and knowledge.

Capacity building is generally recognized to encompass a broader set of objectives and activities than human resources development (which is the focus of this project). While acknowledging that some of such objectives and activities are beyond the scope of this assignment, we are nevertheless aiming for an approach that produces outputs over and above numbers of staff trained and training materials produced.

This approach is characterized by:

Sustainability:
The project will develop human resources of the Iranian Water and Wastewater sector through training, study tours and workshops.
Integration of Iranian and international knowledge by maximizing the number and inputs of Iranian key experts, obtaining input from the water and wastewater sector before finalizing the training programme, exposing managers of European host water and wastewater utilities of the study tours to the issues confronting the Iranian sector.

Exchange:
Within the team a close working relationship is secured between international experts and trainers and Iranian experts. Also, at the level of water and wastewater sector managers, a further opportunity for exchange of knowledge and experience between Iranian and European WWS managers is also realised.

Dissemination:
UNESCO-IHE will put at the disposal of the project it’s VLE, allowing the key experts and other trainers, wherever they are, to jointly work on the preparation of the courses through internet. More importantly, the consultants intend to store training materials of all the different couses on this system. In this manner individual trainees will have access to not just the material presented in the course(s) they themselves attended, but to that of all other courses as well until about 6 months after completion of the project.

Currently preparations are under way for the first training courses. The inception workshop was held in February 2008.