Bolivia will improve water services and resilience to climate change with support from the IDB in partnership with KIF

Financing will benefit more than 262 thousand households with improvements in water services

Bolivia will improve access to potable water services and strengthen mitigation measures to climate change with a loan of $50 million approved by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), which will be complemented by an investment of $25 million from the South Korea Program for Infrastructure Financing in Latin America and the Caribbean (KIF). 

Bolivia is currently experiencingone of the worst droughts in decades since November 2016, which impacts the water supply in urban centers, where the majority of the country's population lives. This forced the government to declare a drought alert, especially in the cities of Potosí, Sucre, Cochabamba, La Paz and El Alto. 

The program aims to expand water supply and increase resilience to extreme effects of droughts in urban areas will be executed by the Ministry of Environment and Water and will mainly finance two types of interventions. The first will be dedicated to infrastructure works to expand and improve water systems, as well as to improve supply and manage supply and demand of water resources to help mitigate water scarcity. These works include construction and rehabilitation of distribution networks, water treatment plants, storage tanks, collection works and pumping plants, among others. 

The second type of intervention will improve the technical and management capacity of water basins that constitute the main sources of water for urban centers. This component includes incorporating planning strategies and expansion of the supply systems to ensure that the demands of the inhabitants can be met in the medium and long term; as well as creating and improving water and climate data monitoring systems and contingency plans in case of prolonged droughts.