Denmark – Foreign economic-aid-related services – Improved Data Collection, Monitoring and Revenue Base for Water Resource Management in Kenya

This Assignment is financed from official Danish development assistance through the Danish Africa Water facility (Danish Finance Act § 06.32.01.32). Emphasis is therefore on providing safe and affordable access to water for all (Sustainable Development Goal 6.1), increase water-use efficiency and ensure freshwater supplies (Sustainable Development Goal 6.4) and to raise capacity for planning and management of climate change (Sustainable Goal 13.5). The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Royal Danish Embassy, Nairobi (RDE) is the funding agency and Water Resources Authority (WRA) is the Recipient of the outcome of the Assignment. The Assignment aims at operating with a high level of local content by engaging local partners with the view of increasing the long-term sustainability of digital systems and ease of their future maintenance as well as enhanced dialogue on water use with local communities. The Water Resources Authority (WRA) is a state corporation established under Section 11 of the Water Act, 2016 and mandated to regulate the management and use of Kenya's water resources on behalf of the national government. WRA formulates standards and regulations, issues and enforces water permits, sets water-use fees, and advises the Cabinet Secretary on national water-resource policy. WRA operates through a decentralised structure comprising one head office, six basin offices, 26 sub-basins, eight laboratories and three satellite offices. WRA is currently undertaking the development of an Enterprise Architecture as part of the Government’s Digitization of Government Services Performance Contracting initiative, in alignment with the Government Enterprise Architecture framework and applicable Government ICT standards. Kenya has a comparatively clear formal water-resource governance architecture, but implementation is constrained by incomplete coordination across national, basin, county and sub-catchment levels, limited basin and sub-basin resources, and overlapping institutional interfaces. WRA already operates digital permitting, e-billing, smart-metering, hydrological monitoring, GIS and laboratory systems; however, these features remains fragmented and have not yet been demonstrated to provide an end-to-end authoritative record linking the water user and abstraction point to the permit, meter, reading, invoice, payment, inspection and hydrological context. The core information-management challenge is not the absence of digital systems, but their fragmentation across field monitoring, permitting, metering, billing, enforcement and hydrological decision support. WRA is working to create integrations between its various IT solutions, but the vision for this project is to support components in establishing a single point of entry/IT solution—hereinafter referred to as WRIMS—that will ensure integration among all existing IT solutions, as shown in the diagram below and elaborated in the background document on WRA’s existing IT environment. The Assignment regarding Improved Data Collection, Monitoring and Revenue Base for Water Resource Management in Kenya (hereafter “IMPRODATWRM”) is expected to be designed to close the institutional and information-management gap while strengthening WRA's own-source revenue base and the evidence available for sustainable allocation. The Assignment is to support WRA in transforming its fragmented digital landscape into an integrated, interoperable WRIMS environment that connects the full operating chain - from registration and permitting through meter/device management, reliable measurement, validation, billing, payment reconciliation, inspection and enforcement, and will connect these regulatory transactions to basin-level hydrological information. Shared identifiers, GIS references, data-governance rules and interoperable interfaces are essential across this chain. The Assignment regarding Improved Data Collection, Monitoring and Revenue Base for Water Resource Management in Kenya (hereafter “IMPRODATWRM”) is expected to be designed to close the institutional and information-management gap while strengthening WRA's own-source revenue base and the evidence available for sustainable allocation. The Assignment is to support WRA in transforming its fragmented digital landscape into an integrated, interoperable WRIMS environment that connects the full operating chain - from registration and permitting through meter/device management, reliable measurement, validation, billing, payment reconciliation, inspection and enforcement, and will connect these regulatory transactions to basin-level hydrological information. Shared identifiers, GIS references, data-governance rules and interoperable interfaces are essential across this chain. The Assignment will align with and leverage the resulting business, data, application, technology and security architectures to guide the design and implementation of WRIMS, while supporting the operationalisation of the EA, particularly in systems integration, interoperability, data governance, ICT infrastructure and cybersecurity. The Assignment is divided into three phases: Phase I: Detailed verification, system analysis and preparation Phase II: A Kenyan-led option assessment and decision Phase III: Design, build, test, roll-out and stabilised operation