Political interference and low tariff policies have led to inefficiency and chronic financial weakness of public utilities. The inability of water supply and sanitation (WSS) utilities to maintain and extend services has led typically to situations where in fact subsidized services are denied to...

The First Community Water and Sanitation Project (CWSP-I), 1994-2000, was the World Bank's first stand-alone rural water and sanitation project in Ghana. It was designed to help achieve the objectives of the National Community Water and Sanitation Program by: a) providing basic water and...

Programs to reform urban utilities and to engage the private sector have tended to focus on large cities and on transactions with large foreign private operators. This is changing, as smaller towns and cities are growing rapidly in many developing countries. Concurrently, decentralization is...

The design of regulation for water supply and sanitation (WSS) services has tended to follow a check-box approach - diagnose the need, prescribe an independent regulator or similar model (often developed in a different sector or country), and hope for the best. This approach has not always...

This paper provides a 'back-of-the-envelope' assessment of the efficiency effects of the reforms of the water sector in Argentina. Private operators are now key players in 15 of Argentina's provinces. While all have adopted incentive based regulatory regimes which require estimates of economic...

The sustainable development goal for water and sanitation - to ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all is a lofty one. Worldwide, 2.4 billion people remain without access to improved sanitation, and nearly 0.7 billion remain without access to improved...