São Paulo – Four executives from the Khartoum State Water Corporation (KSWC) are in Brazil to proceed with the company’s cooperation with the Environmental Sanitation Company of the Federal District (Caesb, in the Portuguese acronym). They arrived in the country in the weekend and will have a full schedule until next Friday, to have a close look at Caesb’s actions and its master plan. The exchange of information should help the Sudanese improve their water and sewage system.
As reported by ANBA in March, Caesb started the cooperation last year, after an agreement between governments made Khartoum and Brasília into sister cities. Ever since, Caesb professionals have travelled to Sudan to see the reality of local sanitation, and Sudanese professionals have come to Brazil to learn from Caesb’s experience. The cooperation also includes the Khartoum State Sewage Corporation.
The schedule of the executives, which started last Monday, includes workshops, visits to laboratories, and technical meetings. According to Caesb’s Maintenance Engineering manager Jânio Barbosa, among other things, they were introduced to a new technology adopted by the company, the flotation system. It takes the place of decantation, a method through which waste is removed from the water.
In the former, chemicals are used to speed up the formation of waste blocks, so they can be separated from the water faster. Through decantation, as the waste blocks form, they get heavy and float down to the lower part of the container. In turn, with the use of flotation, the water receives compressed air in the form of micro bubbles, which rise and carry the blocks to the upper end of the container. A scraper then removes the waste from the water. “The system caught the attention of the Sudanese,” says Barbosa.
Caesb is also showing the KSWC executives its master plan, so that they can implement something similar and improve the planning of Khartoum’s water and sewage system. One suggestion given by the Federal District company, says Barbosa, was the unification of the companies in the Sudanese capital, because both are government-owned, complementary to each other, and similarly structured. “Working separately is a problem,” he says.
The cooperation is meant to provide Khartoum with its own Master Plan, and thus enable it to spot its main investment needs, with the help of Caesb. Barbosa mentions many different actions which could improve the system in Khartoum. Water bills in Khartoum are fixed, no matter the amount used, for instance. As a result, the government pays for a large portion of water and sewage costs.
However, in order to put together a Master Plan and identify the needs, propose changes, and make the companies self-sustained, financing is required, and it has not been obtained yet. Therefore, for the time being, Caesb is only passing its experience with its own Master Plan on to the Sudanese. Right now, each of the parties involved in the cooperation, Caesb and the Sudanese, are paying for their own costs.
The Sudanese in the delegation are the KSWC deputy director general and director general’s assistant for Projects, Mahgoub M. Suliman, the director general’s assistant for Finance and Managing Affairs, Abdel Monim Abdelhai, the director general’s assistant for the Omdurman District, Anwar Elsadat Elhaj, and the KSWC’s technical office director Abdelmutalip M.A. Dawra. The visit is assisted by the Sudanese embassy in Brasília.
*Translated by Gabriel Pomerancblum
