Richard Franceys

• Sanitation for rural housing in Sri Lanka

  01.01.1987
  

• Paying for water — urban water tariffs

  01.07.1990
  

• Private sector participation in water supply and sanitation

  01.01.2003
  Governments around the world are trying public-private partnerships where their own provision of water and sanitation services has proven inadequate. This article describes a number of different forms these partnerships can take.

• Using private operators in small town water supplies, Uganda

  01.01.2003
  Private operators have been managing the water supply of 23 small towns in Uganda for approximately 18 months. This article finds out whether water users – including the poor – have benefited, and whether the system is likely to be sustainable.

• Charging to enter the water shop?

  01.10.2005
  Poor town dwellers are discouraged from obtaining a piped water supply by unaffordable connection charges. This is in spite of the savings in time and money they may make once connected. This article compares actual costs incurred in obtaining a connection, and suggests ways to make these charges affordable to the poor.

• Assessing the costs and consumer behaviour of increasing water connections in low-income areas of Maputo, Mozambique

  01.10.2018
  Águas da Região de Maputo, the water utility serving the capital of Mozambique, has carried out water network expansion projects in peri-urban areas in partnership with the not-for-profit company Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor. This research analyses data from 10 low-income neighbourhoods (bairros) which received network extensions between 2009 and 2014 enabling the propagation of individual domestic water connections. Data from the water utility and 900 household questionnaires undertaken in 2012 and 2017 is used to assess the financial costs and resulting customer behaviour of increasing coverage to the poor. The analysis shows a 78 per cent increase in customers in those neighbourhoods between 2010 and 2016, with the new customers paying a reduced connection fee of 2,000 MZN ($77). The cost of the distribution network extension to the utility is estimated as USD$48.50 per household (2017 prices). The resulting average monthly billed consumption was 9.29 m3 in 2016, corresponding to average monthly bills of 304 MZN ($4.85). The outcomes were positive and encouraging with 83 per cent of households reporting having a water connection, although 32 per cent of customers were consuming below the minimum monthly billed consumption of 5 m3. Bill collection efficiency increased from 50 per cent in 2009 to 80 per cent in 2016 in the newly served low-income areas.

• Community management and participation in multi-village schemes for rural water supply in India

  01.07.2020
  Multi-village schemes (MVSs) connecting hundreds of villages and small towns into a bulk water distribution network represent an emerging frontier for rural water supply in low- and middle-income countries. Conventional rural water supply approaches for such contexts often advocate community management but the scale and complexity of MVSs necessitates alternative approaches. This paper presents three case studies from India of MVSs that focus on the role of communities in their overall management. These illustrate different mechanisms in which community management can or cannot be nested within an overall management system as well as different approaches for promoting community participation. The discussion draws on political economy perspectives to suggest an explanation for the differences across these case studies, while from a public policy perspective, the paper discusses how and why MVSs may lead to the decline of community management in certain contexts.

• Who really pays? A critical overview of the practicalities of funding universal access

  01.01.2016
  The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) include targets to achieve universal access to water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) within the next 15 years (2015–30). To be sustainable, this requires the long-term funding of efficient operating costs, capital maintenance costs, and any costs of capital. It is recognized that this can only be done through a combination of user charges, national taxes, and international transfers. This paper describes the main permutations in present user charges and subsidies, and reports on the ways in which each helps or hinders access by the poor to both rural and urban WASH services. An overview, based on programme experience, academic and grey literature, indicates that it is possible to accelerate the provision of clean water, basic sanitation, and improved hygiene practices ahead of the socio-economic (effective demand) trend line but only with very significant direct and indirect subsidies; direct to consumers and indirect to the supporting institutions or entities (‘the enabling environment’). We conclude that, in the near term at least, it is likely that transfers will have to be acknowledged as a more prominent source of funding for recurrent costs, specifically capital maintenance charges, than donors would prefer. If supporting ongoing services for all, in rural areas or low-income urban settlements, with the necessary level of ongoing subsidies (transfers) is unaffordable for global society, most likely by default, then focusing upon subsidizing the poorest and most marginalized in the long term is the ‘least bad’ alternative approach – but this approach cannot be expected to deliver genuine SDGs.

• What hope for the transition? Evaluating pro-poor water supply interventions in urban low-income settlements in Kenya

  01.10.2016
  A multitude of pro-poor water supply interventions are continually piloted in Kenya’s fast-growing urban settlements to meet national and global Millennium Development Goal targets, yet problems persist, regardless of the investments made. An evaluation is reported of four interventions by public utilities and non-governmental organizations in the low-income settlements of Nairobi, Kisumu and Nakuru, comprising: three ‘distribution’ interventions (‘Social Connections’; ‘WaterChoices Kiosks’; Prepaid Meters) and one ‘supply’ intervention (independently supplied boreholes), through 1,168 household surveys, records analysis, and key informant interviews. The results showed that price reduction (most evident with the prepaid meters) and accessibility is critical for customer satisfaction, with limited sustainability of all the interventions being the confounding factor. Despite showing few positive benefits (apart from the over-riding benefit of availability), 81 per cent of the consumers of borehole water continued to rely on expensive independently supplied boreholes, which were all found to supply contaminated water. In attempting to meet the rapidly growing demand, this study concludes that point source groundwater, with a bias for the poorest (by attempting to control groundwater access elsewhere), may be the transitional solution for the utility to promote in the foreseeable future, out of necessity rather than desire.