Publication:
The Next Frontier in Water Supply Service Delivery: An Assessment of the Performance of Water Sector Service Providers in Pourashavas in Bangladesh

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Files in English
English PDF (1.34 MB)
260 downloads
Date
2019-06
ISSN
Published
2019-06
Author(s)
Bahuguna, Aroha
Huq, Mainul
Editor(s)
Abstract
Using data from the International Benchmarking Network for Water and Sanitation Utilities, this paper on the water sector in pourashavas (municipalities) in Bangladesh provides an analysis of the trends in the water sector development over 2010–16. The main purpose of the paper is to examine the average performance of the water sector providers in the pourashavas to encourage conversation on identifying and addressing deficiencies in service performance in comparison with that in the rest of Bangladesh and the world. This analysis finds that although pourashavas perform on the lower end of the spectrum compared with the rest of Bangladesh on many indicators, the top 20 percent of the pourashavas are globally competitive on indicators of staff productivity, cost coverage, and daily per capita consumption of water.
Link to Data Set
Citation
Bahuguna, Aroha; Andres, Luis Alberto; Joseph, George; Huq, Mainul. 2019. The Next Frontier in Water Supply Service Delivery: An Assessment of the Performance of Water Sector Service Providers in Pourashavas in Bangladesh. Policy Research Working Paper;No. 8919. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/31985 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.
Associated URLs
Associated content
Report Series
Report Series
Other publications in this report series
  • Publication
    Geopolitics and the World Trading System
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-12-23) Mattoo, Aaditya; Ruta, Michele; Staiger, Robert W.
    Until the beginning of this century, the GATT/WTO system worked. Economic research provided a compelling explanation. It showed that if governments maximize the well-being of their own countries broadly defined, GATT/WTO principles would facilitate mutually beneficial cooperation over their trade policy choices. Now heightened geopolitical rivalry seems to have undermined the WTO. A simple transposition of the previous rationalization suggests that geopolitics and trade cooperation are not compatible. The paper shows that this is only true if rivalry eclipses any consideration of own-country well-being. In all other circumstances, there are gains from trade cooperation even with geopolitics. Furthermore, the WTO’s relevance is in question only if it adheres too rigidly to its existing rules and norms. Through measured adaptation to the geopolitical imperative, the WTO can continue to thrive as a forum for multilateral trade cooperation in the age of geopolitics.
  • Publication
    The Macroeconomic Implications of Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Options
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-29) Abalo, Kodzovi; Boehlert, Brent; Bui, Thanh; Burns, Andrew; Castillo, Diego; Chewpreecha, Unnada; Haider, Alexander; Hallegatte, Stephane; Jooste, Charl; McIsaac, Florent; Ruberl, Heather; Smet, Kim; Strzepek, Ken
    Estimating the macroeconomic implications of climate change impacts and adaptation options is a topic of intense research. This paper presents a framework in the World Bank's macrostructural model to assess climate-related damages. This approach has been used in many Country Climate and Development Reports, a World Bank diagnostic that identifies priorities to ensure continued development in spite of climate change and climate policy objectives. The methodology captures a set of impact channels through which climate change affects the economy by (1) connecting a set of biophysical models to the macroeconomic model and (2) exploring a set of development and climate scenarios. The paper summarizes the results for five countries, highlighting the sources and magnitudes of their vulnerability --- with estimated gross domestic product losses in 2050 exceeding 10 percent of gross domestic product in some countries and scenarios, although only a small set of impact channels is included. The paper also presents estimates of the macroeconomic gains from sector-level adaptation interventions, considering their upfront costs and avoided climate impacts and finding significant net gross domestic product gains from adaptation opportunities identified in the Country Climate and Development Reports. Finally, the paper discusses the limits of current modeling approaches, and their complementarity with empirical approaches based on historical data series. The integrated modeling approach proposed in this paper can inform policymakers as they make proactive decisions on climate change adaptation and resilience.
  • Publication
    Global Poverty Revisited Using 2021 PPPs and New Data on Consumption
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-06-05) Foster, Elizabeth; Jolliffe, Dean Mitchell; Ibarra, Gabriel Lara; Lakner, Christoph; Tettah-Baah, Samuel
    Recent improvements in survey methodologies have increased measured consumption in many low- and lower-middle-income countries that now collect a more comprehensive measure of household consumption. Faced with such methodological changes, countries have frequently revised upward their national poverty lines to make them appropriate for the new measures of consumption. This in turn affects the World Bank’s global poverty lines when they are periodically revised. The international poverty line, which is based on the typical poverty line in low-income countries, increases by around 40 percent to $3.00 when the more recent national poverty lines as well as the 2021 purchasing power parities are incorporated. The net impact of the changes in international prices, the poverty line, and new survey data (including new data for India) is an increase in global extreme poverty by some 125 million people in 2022, and a significant shift of poverty away from South Asia and toward Sub-Saharan Africa. The changes at higher poverty lines, which are more relevant to middle-income countries, are mixed.
  • Publication
    From Patriarchy to Policy
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-29) Bussolo, Maurizio; Rexer, Jonah M.; Hu, Lynn
    Legal institutions play an important role in shaping gender equality in economic domains, from inheritance to labor markets. But where do gender equal laws come from? Using cross-country data on social norms and legal equality, this paper investigates the socio-cultural roots of gender inequity in the legal system and its implications for female labor force participation. To identify the impact of social norms, the analysis uses an empirical strategy that exploits pre-modern differences in ancestral patriarchal culture as an instrument for present-day gender norms. The findings show that ancestral patriarchal culture is a strong predictor of contemporary norms, and conservative social norms are associated with more gender inequality in the de jure legal framework, the de facto implementation of laws, and the labor market. The paper presents evidence for a political selection mechanism linking norms to laws: countries with more conservative norms elect political leaders who are more hostile to gender equality, who then pass less progressive legislation. The results highlight the cultural roots and political drivers of legalized gender inequality.
  • Publication
    Global Socio-economic Resilience to Natural Disasters
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-22) Middelanis, Robin; Jafino, Bramka Arga; Hill, Ruth; Nguyen, Minh Cong; Hallegatte, Stephane
    Most disaster risk assessments use damages to physical assets as their central metric, often neglecting distributional impacts and the coping and recovery capacity of affected people. To address this shortcoming, the concepts of well-being losses and socio-economic resilience—the ability to experience asset losses without a decline in well-being—have been proposed. This paper uses microsimulations to produce a global estimate of well-being losses from, and socio-economic resilience to, natural disasters, covering 132 countries. On average, each $1 in disaster-related asset losses results in well-being losses equivalent to a $2 uniform national drop in consumption, with significant variation within and across countries. The poorest income quintile within each country incurs only 9% of national asset losses but accounts for 33% of well-being losses. Compared to high-income countries, low-income countries experience 67% greater well-being losses per dollar of asset losses and require 56% more time to recover. Socio-economic resilience is uncorrelated with exposure or vulnerability to natural hazards. However, a 10 percent increase in GDP per capita is associated with a 0.9 percentage point gain in resilience, but this benefit arises indirectly—such as through higher rate of formal employment, better financial inclusion, and broader social protection coverage—rather than from higher income itself. This paper assess ten policy options and finds that socio-economic and financial interventions (such as insurance and social protection) can effectively complement asset-focused measures (e.g., construction standards) and that interventions targeting low-income populations usually have higher returns in terms of avoided well-being losses per dollar invested.
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue

Related items

Showing items related by metadata.

  • Publication
    Pathways to Progress : Transitioning to Country-Led Service Delivery Pathways to Meet Africa's Water Supply and Sanitation Targets
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2011) African Ministers Council on Water
    The African Ministers Council on Water (AMCOW) commissioned the production of a second round of Country Status Overviews (CSOs) to better understand what underpins progress in water supply and sanitation and what its member governments can do to accelerate that progress across countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Based on the extensive in-country diagnostics, analysis, and stakeholder consultations, the second CSO provides these insights for 32 countries in SSA, for which there are separate individual country reports. This document is the regional synthesis of the 32 country status overviews which collectively account for 95 percent of SSA's population and over 90 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The report highlights the most important trends, challenges, and proposed actions for achieving improved water supply and sanitation (WSS) services across Sub-Saharan Africa. The opportunities for progress are identified based on: understanding trends, identifying the challenge, and prioritizing action.
  • Publication
    Why Do So Many Water Points Fail in Tanzania? An Empirical Analysis of Contributing Factors
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-02) Chellaraj, Gnanaraj; Joseph, George; Grabinsky Zabludovsky, Jonathan; Andres, Luis Alberto; Ayling, Sophie Charlotte Emi; Hoo, Yi Rong
    According to the 2015 Tanzania Water Point Mapping data, about 29 percent of all water points are non-functional, out of which 20 percent failed within the first year. This paper analyzes the various factors which impact water point failure and measures the relative contributions of these determinants. The results indicate that water points managed by village committees had a much higher likelihood of failure than those managed by private operators or water authority. Factors that cannot be modified such as hydrogeological factors play a major role in determining water points failure during the first year after installation. However, management type as well as the type of pump and technology matter considerably more in the short and medium term.
  • Publication
    Estimating the Magnitude of Water Supply and Sanitation Subsidies
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-10) Espineira, Gonzalo; Andres, Luis; Sember, German; Joseph, George; Thibert, Michael
    The water supply and sanitation sector remains heavily subsidized around the world. Yet, the accounting of water supply and sanitation subsidies globally has proved challenging due to utility-level data limitations and their often implicit nature. This paper develops a methodology to estimate water supply and sanitation subsidies that is adaptable to data scarce environments, while accounting for differences among service providers such as population served (to account for economies of scale), coverage of water and sanitation services individually, and their level of operational efficiency in terms of water losses and staffing. This methodology is based on Chile’s empresa modelo (model firm) approach to cost-reflective tariff estimation and uses utility-level data from the World Bank's International Benchmarking Network for Water and Sanitation Utilities database. The results suggest that the cost of subsidies associated with the operations, maintenance, and major repair and replacement of existing water supply and sanitation infrastructure in much of the world (excluding, notably, China and India) is an estimated $289 billion to $353 billion per year, or 0.46 to 0.56 percent of the countries' combined gross domestic product. This figure rises, shockingly, to 1.59 to 1.95 percent if only low- and middle-income economies are considered, an amount largely due to the capital subsidies captured in the estimation. Subsidies of operating costs account for approximately 22 percent of the total subsidy amount in the full sample and for low-income economies separately. Annual subsidy amounts by region range from 0.05 to 2.40 percent of gross domestic product, and low-income economies are generally at the high end of this range. The estimations do not include capital expenditure for infrastructure expansion -- which tends to be fully subsidized -- or environmental costs. Therefore, the actual global magnitude of networked water supply and sanitation subsidies is much greater than the estimation.
  • Publication
    An Evaluation of the Contributing Factors of Water Scheme Failures in Nigeria
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-03) Chellaraj, Gnanaraj; Andres, Luis; Das Gupta, Basab; Grabinsky, Jonathan; Joseph, George
    This paper utilizes information from the 2015 Nigeria National Water and Sanitation Survey to identify the extent and timing of the failure of water schemes in the country and the factors affecting it. Around 46 percent of all the water schemes in Nigeria are nonfunctional, and approximately 30 percent are likely to fail in the first year. The results indicate that during the first year of operation, factors that can be controlled in the design, implementation, and operational stages contribute to the failure of 61 percent of the water schemes. As water schemes age, their likelihood of failure is best predicted by factors that cannot be modified. The influence of operational factors, such as repairs and maintenance, decreases slightly over time.
  • Publication
    Evaluation of Small-Scale Providers of Water Supply and Sanitation Services in Peru
    (Washington, DC, 2007-06) World Bank
    The Water and Sanitation Program (WSP), administered by the World Bank, helps countries find sustainable solutions to ensure efficient delivery of the quality water supply and sanitation services the population demands. The WSP is carrying out a systematic analysis in several countries to identify the role of small-scale providers (SSP) of water and sanitation services to poor populations not served by public and private entities. The study also examines how these operators fit in and respond to sector policies and the organization of the sector in each country. The objective of this study is to identify the reasons for the existence of small-scale providers of water SSP in Peru and to evaluate the experience of these operators, with an emphasis on their coverage, service quality, costs and sustainability. The evaluation also includes proposals to improve service to the market traditionally served by SSP. The study was divided into three phases: (a) a sector assessment to determine why sector policies and financial and institutional resources have not produced service provision to the entire population, particularly to the segments served by SSP; (b) surveys in 14 communities with SSP and an analysis of responses to questions pertaining to legal, technical, market and financial aspects, as well as consumers' perceptions; and (c) sector policy recommendations with respect to SSP, and suggestions for priority projects to support better service delivery.

Users also downloaded

Showing related downloaded files

  • Publication
    Media and Messages for Nutrition and Health
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-06) Calleja, Ramon V., Jr.; Mbuya, Nkosinathi V.N.; Morimoto, Tomo; Thitsy, Sophavanh
    The Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) has experienced rapid and significant economic growth over the past decade. However, poor nutritional outcomes remain a concern. Rates of childhood undernutrition are particularly high in remote, rural, and upland areas. Media have the potential to play an important role in shaping health and nutrition–related behaviors and practices as well as in promoting sociocultural and economic development that might contribute to improved nutritional outcomes. This report presents the results of a media audit (MA) that was conducted to inform the development and production of mass media advocacy and communication strategies and materials with a focus on maternal and child health and nutrition that would reach the most people from the poorest communities in northern Lao PDR. Making more people aware of useful information, essential services and products and influencing them to use these effectively is the ultimate goal of mass media campaigns, and the MA measures the potential effectiveness of media efforts to reach this goal. The effectiveness of communication channels to deliver health and nutrition messages to target beneficiaries to ensure maximum reach and uptake can be viewed in terms of preferences, satisfaction, and trust. Overall, the four most accessed media channels for receiving information among communities in the study areas were village announcements, mobile phones, television, and out-of-home (OOH) media. Of the accessed media channels, the top three most preferred channels were village announcements (40 percent), television (26 percent), and mobile phones (19 percent). In terms of trust, village announcements were the most trusted source of information (64 percent), followed by mobile phones (14 percent) and television (11 percent). Hence of all the media channels, village announcements are the most preferred, have the most satisfied users, and are the most trusted source of information in study communities from four provinces in Lao PDR with some of the highest burden of childhood undernutrition.
  • Publication
    Economic Recovery
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-04-06) Malpass, David; Georgieva, Kristalina; Yellen, Janet
    World Bank Group President David Malpass spoke about the world facing major challenges, including COVID, climate change, rising poverty and inequality and growing fragility and violence in many countries. He highlighted vaccines, working closely with Gavi, WHO, and UNICEF, the World Bank has conducted over one hundred capacity assessments, many even more before vaccines were available. The World Bank Group worked to achieve a debt service suspension initiative and increased transparency in debt contracts at developing countries. The World Bank Group is finalizing a new climate change action plan, which includes a big step up in financing, building on their record climate financing over the past two years. He noted big challenges to bring all together to achieve GRID: green, resilient, and inclusive development. Janet Yellen, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, mentioned focusing on vulnerable people during the pandemic. Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, focused on giving everyone a fair shot during a sustainable recovery. All three commented on the importance of tackling climate change.
  • Publication
    World Development Report 2021
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2021-03-24) World Bank
    Today’s unprecedented growth of data and their ubiquity in our lives are signs that the data revolution is transforming the world. And yet much of the value of data remains untapped. Data collected for one purpose have the potential to generate economic and social value in applications far beyond those originally anticipated. But many barriers stand in the way, ranging from misaligned incentives and incompatible data systems to a fundamental lack of trust. World Development Report 2021: Data for Better Lives explores the tremendous potential of the changing data landscape to improve the lives of poor people, while also acknowledging its potential to open back doors that can harm individuals, businesses, and societies. To address this tension between the helpful and harmful potential of data, this Report calls for a new social contract that enables the use and reuse of data to create economic and social value, ensures equitable access to that value, and fosters trust that data will not be misused in harmful ways. This Report begins by assessing how better use and reuse of data can enhance the design of public policies, programs, and service delivery, as well as improve market efficiency and job creation through private sector growth. Because better data governance is key to realizing this value, the Report then looks at how infrastructure policy, data regulation, economic policies, and institutional capabilities enable the sharing of data for their economic and social benefits, while safeguarding against harmful outcomes. The Report concludes by pulling together the pieces and offering an aspirational vision of an integrated national data system that would deliver on the promise of producing high-quality data and making them accessible in a way that promotes their safe use and reuse. By examining these opportunities and challenges, the Report shows how data can benefit the lives of all people, but particularly poor people in low- and middle-income countries.
  • Publication
    World Development Report 2020
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2020) World Bank
    Global value chains (GVCs) powered the surge of international trade after 1990 and now account for almost half of all trade. This shift enabled an unprecedented economic convergence: poor countries grew rapidly and began to catch up with richer countries. Since the 2008 global financial crisis, however, the growth of trade has been sluggish and the expansion of GVCs has stalled. Meanwhile, serious threats have emerged to the model of trade-led growth. New technologies could draw production closer to the consumer and reduce the demand for labor. And conflicts among large countries could lead to a retrenchment or a segmentation of GVCs. This book examines whether there is still a path to development through GVCs and trade. It concludes that technological change is, at this stage, more a boon than a curse. GVCs can continue to boost growth, create better jobs, and reduce poverty provided that developing countries implement deeper reforms to promote GVC participation; industrial countries pursue open, predictable policies; and all countries revive multilateral cooperation.
  • Publication
    Remarks at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-10-12) Malpass, David
    World Bank Group President David Malpass discussed biodiversity and climate change being closely interlinked, with terrestrial and marine ecosystems serving as critically important carbon sinks. At the same time climate change acts as a direct driver of biodiversity and ecosystem services loss. The World Bank has financed biodiversity conservation around the world, including over 116 million hectares of Marine and Coastal Protected Areas, 10 million hectares of Terrestrial Protected Areas, and over 300 protected habitats, biological buffer zones and reserves. The COVID pandemic, biodiversity loss, climate change are all reminders of how connected we are. The recovery from this pandemic is an opportunity to put in place more effective policies, institutions, and resources to address biodiversity loss.