NWC Spent Nearly $45 Billion on Capital Projects But Could Not Show Whether More Jamaicans Got Clean Water

Jamaica’s National Water Commission budgeted $44.92 billion in capital expenditure over five years while failing to measure whether ordinary Jamaicans gained access to clean water or sewerage services — a fundamental gap in public accountability that the Auditor General has now placed before Parliament. With roughly seven in ten pieces of NWC infrastructure beyond the 40-year mark, the question of whether that spending is achieving anything is not merely administrative — it is a matter of daily life for hundreds of thousands of households across the island.

For five consecutive fiscal years, the National Water Commission spent and planned to spend billions of dollars improving Jamaica’s water and sewerage infrastructure. Over the same period, the Commission could not tell the public — or Parliament — whether the number of Jamaicans with access to safe drinking water or basic sanitation was going up or down. That is the central finding of a performance audit published by the Auditor General of Jamaica on June 3, 2026, and tabled in Parliament six days later.

The audit examined NWC’s management of capital projects across the five fiscal years from FY2019/20 through FY2023/24. The Commission is the sole national authority responsible for piped water supply and sewerage services, meaning its performance — or the absence of measurable performance — touches every household, business, school, health centre and agricultural operation that depends on a functioning water network. The Auditor General’s findings raise serious questions about whether Jamaica’s largest utility is being run with the rigour that nearly $45 billion in public and institutional capital demands.

The headline figure alone commands attention. NWC’s budgeted capital expenditure across the five-year review period totalled $44.92 billion. That is not money the Commission earned from service efficiency or commercial enterprise. It is funding directed at maintaining and upgrading an infrastructure network so aged that approximately 70 percent of it has surpassed 40 years of operational life. Pipes, pumping stations, treatment works and distribution systems that were built in the 1970s and 1980s are still the backbone of water delivery across parishes from Westmoreland to Portland. When infrastructure of that vintage fails — and it does fail, with consequences that range from boil-water notices to complete community outages — the costs fall first on the households least equipped to absorb them.

Against that backdrop, the audit identifies four substantive failures in how NWC has planned, prioritised and tracked its capital programme. Each failure, taken alone, would represent a governance weakness worth correcting. Taken together, they describe a Commission that has been directing enormous resources through a system that does not reliably direct them where they are most needed, and that has not been checking whether the results materialise in the lives of the people it serves.

The first failure concerns how NWC chooses which capital projects to fund. The Commission developed Water Supply Improvement Plans to inform its Capital Investment Plan covering 2015 to 2030 — a responsible starting point for long-term infrastructure planning. The problem identified by the Auditor General is that when it came to scoring individual projects against that plan, NWC applied the methodology inconsistently. Scoring criteria that should be applied uniformly across all candidate projects were not. The integrity of any capital prioritisation process depends entirely on consistent application of its rules. When those rules shift from project to project, the outcome is no longer a rational allocation of scarce resources toward the highest-need interventions. It becomes, at best, a process that introduces avoidable subjectivity and, at worst, one that is susceptible to decisions that have no defensible basis in evidence.

For communities that have been waiting years for a pipeline rehabilitation, a new pump, or a sewerage connection — the implications of this finding are direct. If the Commission’s own scoring system was not reliably ranking projects by genuine priority, then some of the most critically underserved areas may have waited longer than they should have while resources went elsewhere. The audit does not name specific communities or contracts, but the systemic nature of the inconsistency means its effects could be felt across the island.

The second failure involves operational efficiency. NWC set Key Performance Indicator targets to measure how efficiently it was delivering services. Across the audit period, the Commission did not consistently meet those targets. KPIs of this kind — tracking metrics such as the proportion of water produced that is actually billed and paid for, known in the industry as non-revenue water — are essential management tools. High non-revenue water rates, a persistent challenge for Caribbean utilities, mean that the energy, chemicals and capital invested in treating and pumping water never generate the revenue that would fund further improvement. When an organisation consistently falls short of its own efficiency benchmarks without a credible plan to close the gap, the underperformance compounds over time. It drains the financial headroom that would otherwise support capital expansion or rehabilitation.

The third failure is financial. Revenue Growth targets, which the Commission set as part of its performance framework, were missed in four of the five fiscal years under review. The sole exception was FY2022/23. Sustained shortfalls in revenue generation against plan are not simply a matter of accounting. They constrain the Commission’s capacity to fund operations, service debt and contribute meaningfully to its own capital programme. An NWC that cannot grow its revenues at the rate it has projected is an NWC that will become more dependent on external financing — government transfers, multilateral loans, bilateral grants — to keep the capital programme moving. That dependence shifts financial risk onto Jamaican taxpayers and reduces the Commission’s autonomy to plan and execute without external conditions attached.

The fourth failure is the most fundamental, and it is the one that defines the audit’s central accountability concern. Among the KPIs that NWC was expected to track were measures of the proportion of the population with access to potable water and the proportion with access to sewerage services. These are not peripheral performance metrics. They are the primary reason the Commission exists. An organisation mandated to bring safe water and sanitation to Jamaicans should, at minimum, be able to say each year whether it is reaching more people than it did the year before.

According to the Auditor General, these KPIs were neither measured nor reported throughout most of the five-year review period. The Commission subsequently provided data for FY2024/25 in November 2025 — a step in the right direction, but one that came only after the audit had exposed the gap, and only after five years in which investment decisions were being made without this foundational information on the table. The public, Parliament and the Commission’s own board were operating without knowing whether the most basic indicator of NWC’s mandate — are more people getting clean water and sewerage services? — was moving in the right direction.

The practical consequences of this accountability void touch every sector of Jamaican life. Farmers in the rural parishes who depend on reliable irrigation cannot plan around an infrastructure whose performance trends are unknown. Homeowners and property developers weighing investment decisions need confidence that water supply and sewerage connections will be available and sustainable. Households in low-income communities — many of which have historically had the most tenuous connections to the piped network — have had no basis on which to assess whether the Commission’s capital programme is narrowing or widening the access gap that affects them most. Businesses operating in hospitality, food processing, health care and education all depend on water supply in ways that make NWC’s performance a direct input into their own productivity and compliance costs.

The root causes identified in the audit are institutional rather than incidental. Weaknesses in planning frameworks, inconsistent application of project scoring criteria and the absence of systematised outcome measurement are not one-off errors. They reflect habits of management that, if not structurally corrected, will persist regardless of how much capital flows through the Commission’s budget in the years ahead. The Auditor General’s findings effectively separate the question of how much NWC is spending from the question of what that spending is achieving — and the answer to the second question, for most of the past five years, has been: we do not know.

Parliament now has the audit in hand. What it does with the findings — and what NWC’s board and management commit to in response — will determine whether the next five-year capital programme is designed and monitored differently from the last one. The Commission’s belated reporting of access KPIs for FY2024/25 suggests some recognition that the measurement gap was untenable. But a single year of data, provided after an audit revealed its absence, does not constitute a functioning performance management system. It constitutes the beginning of one.

The audit makes clear that meaningful improvement will require NWC to do three things it has not consistently done: apply a uniform and transparent methodology when scoring and selecting capital projects; build a performance monitoring framework that tracks efficiency and revenue outcomes in real time; and place population access to potable water and sewerage services at the centre of every capital planning decision, measuring it every year and reporting it publicly. If those conditions are met, the next $45 billion will have a genuine chance of producing an outcome the Commission can demonstrate. If they are not, Jamaica will again be left to wonder whether the billions spent on ageing infrastructure made any difference to the people waiting at the tap.

Jamaica Accountability Watch is an independent editorial series by Jamaica Homes News examining what government audit reports reveal about the management of public money. Source: Auditor General’s Department of Jamaica.

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