Pro-poor concessions for sustainable water services

Abstract

Most of the billions of people without drinking water or sanitation are very poor. While private-sector companies are becoming increasingly involved with infrastructure provision in developing countries, their contracts for water and sanitation services tend to forget the social aspects of providing services to poor people. As such, public–private partnerships in particularly poor countries are unlikely to be sustainable in the longer term and UN targets for improvements will fail to be met. Based on a four-year research project in Asia, Africa and Latin America, this paper explains how concession contracts need to be more suited to the needs, resources and aspirations of local impoverished communities—in other words, to be more pro-poor.

Prioritising climate adaptation options to minimise financial and distributional impacts of water supply disruptions

“…This is problematic because intermittent supplies, including climate-induced service disruptions, can significantly undermine efforts towards water supply security (Griffin and Mjelde 2000, Beard and Mitlin 2021, Grasham et al 2022a. Further, in the context of combined national development and climate adaptation objectives, the identification of 'pro-poor' investment strategies are increasingly called-for (Sohail et al 2007, Nagpal et al 2018. However, despite the importance of mainstreaming equity considerations in risk analysis in the potable water sector (Grasham et al 2022b), to the authors' knowledge, no decision-making framework exists to investigate synergies and trade-offs between climate adaptation and equity in this sector.…”