Non-revenue water - a board metric

In 2025, non-revenue water has outgrown the engineering backroom and entered the board pack. Directors in utilities and industrial estates now ask a simple question each month: how much treated water failed to become revenue, and why? The answer blends two stories. One is physical—bursts and background leakage bleeding systems that run too hard, too often. The other is commercial - illegal connections, meter error and data gaps that make billed volumes a fiction. The International Water Association’s standard balance has become the common language here, separating apparent from real losses and turning “mystery gaps” into measurable categories leaders can actually govern.

In West Africa, the urgency is visible. Ghana’s regulator has spent the last year surfacing national NRW in the mid-40s percent, a level that depresses cash flow and forces utilities to chase production expansions without first rescuing treated litres already paid for. In Lagos, the public conversation has sharpened as the State explores a pilot public-private partnership: the city is widely reported to need hundreds of millions of gallons per day more than it supplies, and any credible reform will be judged on whether it cuts losses as much as it boosts output. The signal to operators and investors is clear—loss control is no longer a side quest; it is the test of stewardship.

NRW is not just a technical KPI; it is a margin, resilience and licence-to-operate issue. Every percentage point you recover is permanent opex relief and incremental revenue without touching a treatment plant. Boards have also learned that NRW masks risk: leaks escalate into bursts, legal exposure rises when billed volumes diverge from reality, and emergency tanker operations become a political crutch. The discipline that tames NRW—honest baselines, districting, pressure logic, metering sanity - also makes audits easier and capital more bankable, which is why lenders and regulators now look for a credible loss-reduction plan before backing “more capacity.”

The Ghana story underlines the commercial side of the problem. Public reporting this year highlighted tens of millions of cedis lost to illegal connections and meter tampering, proof that “apparent losses” are not theory but a line item. For boards, that reframes the conversation from “engineering project” to “revenue protection,” and it explains why enforcement, customer data and field operations now sit in the same NRW steering group.

Advanced metering is not a silver bullet; it is the flywheel that makes every other NRW tactic compound. Accurate, time-stamped consumption closes the loop between production, district flows and customer bills. It shortens the diagnostic path from “something is off” to “this zone, at this hour, after this pressure change,” and it makes honest billing politically defensible because customers see usage and anomalies rather than estimates. European regulators have spent the last programme cycles quantifying this, with Ofwat’s recent work showing measurable consumption reductions when moving from unmeasured to baseline meters and further gains from smart deployments—savings that show up as fewer litres treated needlessly and fewer disputes downstream.

For West African utilities, the immediate win from AMI is not gadgetry but visibility. District pressure and flow tied to interval data lets operations adjust set-points to curb background leakage without starving end users, while anomaly detection surfaces bursts and theft hours - not weeks - after they begin. Practitioner case material published this summer emphasises that pairing meter data with pressure management is what actually moves the needle: stabilise where you can, reduce where you should, and use telemetry to prove that service quality stayed inside agreed envelopes.

Policy and politics matter because they shape sequencing. In Lagos, stakeholder consultations around a pilot PPP have centred on reliability, equity and affordability. That naturally elevates NRW as a first-100-days deliverable: it is defensible with citizens, it protects scarce water already produced, and it creates near-term cash to fund upgrades. The same storyline runs through neighbouring markets: Ghana’s regulator continues to publish NRW figures that keep pressure on management teams, and public debate connects loss control to fairness - why raise tariffs if half the water disappears? A credible programme starts by proving the baseline, not promising miracles.

The commercial context is equally sharp. Reports of losses from illegal connections are not simply enforcement talking points; they are reminders that metering, customer data and field operations must be designed to work together. Smart metering then becomes the audit trail for legitimate use, the early-warning for anomalies and the public ledger that reassures paying customers they are not subsidising theft.

European utilities have been forced to link leakage targets to investment approvals, which has created a playbook Lagos and Accra can borrow without apology. The pattern is to justify smart metering as a system tool rather than a billing project, to publish district-level dashboards that show service alongside savings, and to tie incentives to verified reductions rather than modelled ones. That discipline travels well. It lowers the cost of capital, it steadies politics, and it shortens the time from “pilot” to “programme” because everyone can see the same numbers moving in the right direction.

The temptation is to start with a mass meter roll-out. The smarter move is to stand up a measurement spine first. Verify production meters, instrument a handful of representative districts, and reconcile the IWA water balance with actual data. Then introduce smart meters where network conditions and revenue risk are highest, using interval data to guide pressure changes and night-flow hunts. Wrap this in a simple rule: if the numbers do not reconcile each week, freeze expansion and fix what is wrong. That habit prevents “pilot success, programme failure.”

Contracts should reward verified NRW reductions, not activity. Performance-based contracts for loss control have a long paper trail at the World Bank and elsewhere; they shift the burden of delivery to the party best able to do the work and pay out only when the water balance actually improves. That aligns perfectly with boards’ new appetite for evidence over effort and gives finance a clean basis for scaling the programme.

Our team designs NRW programmes that win trust quickly and scale safely. We begin with an honest baseline - production meter sanity checks, a district-level balance using IWA methodology, and a reconciling view of real versus apparent losses. We then design a meter strategy that treats AMI as a system instrument: interval reads to inform pressure management, tamper and backflow signalling to clean up the customer book, and dashboards that show service and savings side by side. When we propose pilots in Lagos or Accra, they come with weekly reconciliation, before-and-after pressure profiles and a public-ready summary, so early wins are visible without spin.

We also structure contracts to pay for outcomes. Where clients prefer external delivery, we help specify performance-based NRW contracts with clean baselines, independent verification and transparent savings allocation. Where teams run work in-house, we provide the operating playbook and the governance cadence that keeps engineering, revenue protection and customer care aligned. Either way, the board gets a number it can rely on, and citizens get a service that quietly improves.