Publication: Water Supply: The Transition from Emergency to Development Support
Loading...
Published
2017-02
ISSN
Date
2017-10-30
Editor(s)
Abstract
Donors supporting countries affected by fragility conflict and violence face a difficult trade-off. Should they deliver urgently needed water supply infrastructure through non-state actors or build the country institutions that deliver water supply? This report confirms that the current response to this trade-off relies heavily on the direct delivery of aid by international agencies and NGOs. This leaves country institutions in their post-crisis enfeabled condition often locking these countries into humanitarian aid modalities. The technical assistance in seven countries across Africa, described in this report, explored two entry points for (re)building country institutions: i) strengthening sector oversight (by using data on service delivery to better orchestrate external support) and ii) utility reform (actively encouraging utilities to cover their operation and maintenance costs through consumer tariffs). Stretching these 'development' interventions into protracted crises and early post-crisis periods opened up greater opportunity for a double dividend: that of improving water supply services and of state building.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Duret, Michel; Gaju, Anita; Hirn, Maximilian; Huston, Sam; Jain, Nitin; Mirindi, Deo; Mudege, Ngoni; Niyungeko, Deo-Marcel; Richey, Chantal; Ochieng, Christine; Print, Chris; Sitali, Muyatwa; Skilling, Heather; de Waal, Dominick. 2017. Water Supply: The Transition from Emergency to Development Support. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/28599 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Improving Utility Performance in Fragile Environments(World Bank, Nairobi, Kenya, 2015-07)This note summarizes lessons from the Water and Sanitation Program’s (WSP) technical assistance to improve performance and cost-recovery at the Liberia Water and Sewer Corporation (LWSC) and Sierra Leone’s Guma Valley Water Company (GVWC). The focus on cost-recovery reflects its critical importance to the viability of utilities. There are ‘almost no examples in developing countries’ of utilities ‘whose operating revenues are significantly below O&M costs and that are nevertheless able to develop and maintain their infrastructure and provide a reliable and efficient service’. (McPhail, et al., 2012). WSP’s technical assistance sought to strengthen reform efforts initiated by the management teams at LWSC and GVWC by improving the utilities’ ability to sustainably fund their operations. Three aspects of cost-recovery were prioritized: (a) improving metering, billing and collection processes (b) reducing commercial non-revenue water and (c) investigating options to expand the utilities’ revenue base by connecting new customers more effectively.Publication Private Sector Participation in the Ugandan Water Sector : A Review of Ten Years of Private Management of Small Town Water Systems(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-12)This working paper reviews the first decade (2001-11) of Uganda's pioneering private sector participation (PSP) model for small town water supply. The number of towns under the PSP model has steadily risen from only 15 in 2001-02 to over 90 in 2010-11 with a combined population of over 1.5 million. In evaluating the impact of this development, this working paper aims to guide further reform within Uganda, and to inform other countries considering similar PSP approaches. The core idea behind PSP centered reform in Uganda was to improve sustainability and efficiency of piped networks in small towns by hiring private operators (POs) for their commercial management. Driven by a profit motive, POs were expected to maximize revenue, minimize waste and maintain and expand networks in a sustainable manner. To guard social objectives, infrastructure remained under government ownership and the introduction of POs was accompanied by a complex regulation, as well as support, framework.Publication Achieving Financial Sustainability and Recovering Costs in Bank Financed Water Supply and Sanitation and Irrigation Projects(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-06)This note is a partial response to the above mentioned 2010 Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) evaluation. It covers the specific issues to be addressed in the Water supply and Sanitation (WSS) sector and in the irrigation sector in two distinct parts, because if WSS and irrigation have some common features, there are many distinctions to be made. Among the various water-using sectors, that include navigation, fisheries, hydropower, rain fed agriculture, irrigated agriculture, WSS, and more generally 'the environment', cost recovery issues are of primary concern, and are the focus for this note, in the WSS and irrigation sectors. This preliminary background Note is divided in four parts: a 'history' of the call for financial sustainability and cost recovery and the parallel documenting of the lack of progress. This section ends with what this Note hopes to achieve in the face of what is clearly a deeply rooted problem; an outline of options to be considered for achieving financial sustainability of WSS service providers and recovering the costs of the WSS service through tariffs, i.e., from users and through subsidies; a discussion on what makes financial sustainability of irrigation projects different from WSS projects; and a summary of recommendations to teams involved in the identification, preparation, appraisal and supervision of water projects and of practical measures and actions that both the water sector board and the water anchor could take to help improve the Bank's track record in achieving and financial sustainability of the water projects it finances.Publication Turbulent Waters(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-03-14)Water insecurity—ranging from chronic water scarcity to lack of access to safe drinking water and sanitation services, to hydrological uncertainty and extremes (floods and droughts)—can cause severe disruptions and compound fragilities in social, economic, and environmental systems. Untangling the role of water insecurity in contributing to fragility is difficult, yet it is becoming a fundamental question for water policy worldwide given the scale of the fragility challenge. This report explores the dynamics between water insecurity and fragility. It suggests that water security is more difficult to achieve in fragile contexts because of a range of factors, including weak institutions and information systems, strained human and financial resources, and degraded infrastructure. This report focuses on three main mechanisms by which water insecurity and fragility interact: (1) failure to provide citizens with basic water services; (2) failure to protect citizens from water-related disasters; and (3) failure to preserve surface, ground and transboundary water resources.Publication Africa - Ebbing Water, Surging Deficits : Urban Water Supply in Sub-Saharan Africa(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-06)With only 56 percent of the population enjoying access to safe water, Sub-Saharan Africa lags behind other regions in terms of access to improved water sources. Based on present trends, it appears that the region is unlikely to meet the target of 75 percent access to improved water by 2015, as specified in the Millennium Development Goals (MDG). The welfare implications of safe water cannot be overstated. The estimated health and time-saving benefits of meeting the MDG goal are about 11 times as high as the associated costs. Monitoring the progress of infrastructure sectors such as water supply has been a significant by-product of the MDG, and serious attention and funding have been devoted in recent years to developing systems for monitoring and evaluating in developing countries. Piped water reaches more urban Africans than any other form of water supply-but not as large a share as it did in the early 1990s. The most recent available data for 32 countries suggests that some 39 percent of the urban population of Sub-Saharan Africa is connected to a piped network, compared with 50 percent in the early 1990s. Analysis suggests that the majority of those who lack access to utility water live too far away from the distribution network, although some fail to connect even when they live close by. Water-sector institutions follow no consistent pattern in Sub-Saharan Africa. Where service is centralized, a significant minority has chosen to combine power and water services into a single national multi-utility urban water sector reforms were carried out in the 1990s, with the aim of creating commercially oriented utilities and bringing the sector under formal regulation. One goal of the reforms was to attract private participation in the sector.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Breaking the Conflict Trap : Civil War and Development Policy(Washington, DC: World Bank and Oxford University Press, 2003)Most wars are now civil wars. Even though international wars attract enormous global attention, they have become infrequent and brief. Civil wars usually attract less attention, but they have become increasingly common and typically go on for years. This report argues that civil war is now an important issue for development. War retards development, but conversely, development retards war. This double causation gives rise to virtuous and vicious circles. Where development succeeds, countries become progressively safer from violent conflict, making subsequent development easier. Where development fails, countries are at high risk of becoming caught in a conflict trap in which war wrecks the economy and increases the risk of further war. The global incidence of civil war is high because the international community has done little to avert it. Inertia is rooted in two beliefs: that we can safely 'let them fight it out among themselves' and that 'nothing can be done' because civil war is driven by ancestral ethnic and religious hatreds. The purpose of this report is to challenge these beliefs.Publication Government Matters III : Governance Indicators for 1996-2002(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2003-08)The authors present estimates of six dimensions of governance covering 199 countries and territories for four time periods: 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002. These indicators are based on several hundred individual variables measuring perceptions of governance, drawn from 25 separate data sources constructed by 18 different organizations. The authors assign these individual measures of governance to categories capturing key dimensions of governance and use an unobserved components model to construct six aggregate governance indicators in each of the four periods. They present the point estimates of the dimensions of governance as well as the margins of errors for each country for the four periods. The governance indicators reported here are an update and expansion of previous research work on indicators initiated in 1998 (Kaufmann, Kraay, and Zoido-Lobat 1999a,b and 2002). The authors also address various methodological issues, including the interpretation and use of the data given the estimated margins of errors.Publication Design Thinking for Social Innovation(2010-07)Designers have traditionally focused on enchancing the look and functionality of products.Publication Governance Matters IV : Governance Indicators for 1996-2004(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2005-06)The authors present the latest update of their aggregate governance indicators, together with new analysis of several issues related to the use of these measures. The governance indicators measure the following six dimensions of governance: (1) voice and accountability; (2) political instability and violence; (3) government effectiveness; (4) regulatory quality; (5) rule of law, and (6) control of corruption. They cover 209 countries and territories for 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, and 2004. They are based on several hundred individual variables measuring perceptions of governance, drawn from 37 separate data sources constructed by 31 organizations. The authors present estimates of the six dimensions of governance for each period, as well as margins of error capturing the range of likely values for each country. These margins of error are not unique to perceptions-based measures of governance, but are an important feature of all efforts to measure governance, including objective indicators. In fact, the authors give examples of how individual objective measures provide an incomplete picture of even the quite particular dimensions of governance that they are intended to measure. The authors also analyze in detail changes over time in their estimates of governance; provide a framework for assessing the statistical significance of changes in governance; and suggest a simple rule of thumb for identifying statistically significant changes in country governance over time. The ability to identify significant changes in governance over time is much higher for aggregate indicators than for any individual indicator. While the authors find that the quality of governance in a number of countries has changed significantly (in both directions), they also provide evidence suggesting that there are no trends, for better or worse, in global averages of governance. Finally, they interpret the strong observed correlation between income and governance, and argue against recent efforts to apply a discount to governance performance in low-income countries.Publication Governance Matters VIII : Aggregate and Individual Governance Indicators 1996–2008(2009-06-01)This paper reports on the 2009 update of the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) research project, covering 212 countries and territories and measuring six dimensions of governance between 1996 and 2008: Voice and Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law, and Control of Corruption. These aggregate indicators are based on hundreds of specific and disaggregated individual variables measuring various dimensions of governance, taken from 35 data sources provided by 33 different organizations. The data reflect the views on governance of public sector, private sector and NGO experts, as well as thousands of citizen and firm survey respondents worldwide. The authors also explicitly report the margins of error accompanying each country estimate. These reflect the inherent difficulties in measuring governance using any kind of data. They find that even after taking margins of error into account, the WGI permit meaningful cross-country comparisons as well as monitoring progress over time. The aggregate indicators, together with the disaggregated underlying indicators, are available at www.govindicators.org.