Preliminary Assessment of Applying Pre-paid Water Meters (PWMs): Selected Cases from Palestine

The Palestinian water firms such as Municipal Councils, municipalities, and Joint Service Councils, are suffering from financial, technical, managerial, and social problems, such as; losses, collection efficiency of due water payments, old networks, high and commutative debts, high price of bought water, pumping the water to high level areas, high operation and maintenance cost, illegal consumption (Thefts). Hence the economic revenue of such essential municipal service (supplying of water) becomes very low, that may cause a considerable collapse in the financial systems for some of water firms. This research study aims to introduce a preliminary assessment of applying PWM of the selected cases from Palestine. The study focus on the impact of installing the PWM financially, socially, technically, and managerially at Jenin south western villages and Al-Jaroushiya village in Tulkarem. This research starts with reviewing relevant researches and studies related to PWMs system. This is followed by conducting a number of interviews, Focus Group Discussion (FGD) with inhabitants and water providers, 489 questionnaires were distributed at the PWMs users for the selected sample and analyzed to reinforce the research results. The results which obtained after three years of installing PWM indicated that the residents accepted the PWM's, since; more than 82% of the inhabitants were happy of using PWM's, 78% of the respondents believe that PWM is better than old billing system. Furthermore; the PWM system helps the inhabitants to conserve water than the billing system. The results indicate that the average monthly expenses of water was less than the other expenses such as; electricity, cars, internet, phones, gas, and smoking. A regression equation for water expenses was obtained by SPSS, where the water expenses can be estimated if the other expenses were known. It was concluded also that applying the PWM in the target villages solved many of the financial, technical, and managerial such as; the deficiency in revenue collection which get 100%, stopped the increased debts and returned back 20% of the old dead debts monthly, reduced the losses resulted from thefts and saved the payment of collection employees. The results show that the PWM helped in controlling over some of the technical malfunctions through reduced the losses resulted from the employee reader errors, PWM installation also helped in achieving the equity of water distribution between inhabitants, and the PWM saved the salaries of the collection employers, since; the inhabitants go to pay directly to the water providers accountant through charging the cards. The recommendation related to PWMs installation were raised to be taken into considerations from the water providers whom willing to use the PWM such as; studying the specification of the PWM used, sure of the capability of operation the PWM with emergency cases, studying the tariff structure related to PWM system, poor families shall be taken into account to settle their financial problems to insure of succeeding the system.