Current access to piped water infrastructure in Afghanistan is among the lowest in the world at around 18%, while sanitation is rudimentary. Only Kabul (with a present estimated population of 4 million people) and 16 other towns with populations ranging from 50,000 to 1,000,000 have formal piped water supply systems, serving a total of only about 80,000 connections, of which about 37,000 are in Kabul, and because of poor operation and maintenance the water service reaches an even lower share of the population. At the same time, the scarce water resources are increasingly being polluted and overexploited.

Building up on the previous GTZ project Institutional Development of Water Supply and Sewerage Utilities, also implemented by RODECO (now GOPA Infra), the project shall enhance the managerial, administrative, technical and financial-commercial capacities of the water supply providers in the cities of Kabul, Herat, Kunduz, Faizabad and other provincial towns in the northeast, thereby ensuring the sustainability of the significant investments of KfW (and other donors) for rehabilitation and extension of the water supply infrastructure in those cities.