Equity and poverty

The draft WDR would be strengthened by a deeper and broader analysis of poverty, and of how poverty prevents people from using basic services. At present, poverty is ill-defined, beyond being associated with a lack of voice – in line with the report’s focus on accountability.

The role of direct and opportunity costs in preventing access to services is neglected. A more thorough discussion of the relationship between cost and access would in our view force the WDR team to re-consider its support for user fees, especially in health care and water.

Similarly, the case for targeted subsidies would be weakened if the WDR recognised that poverty is dynamic, and heterogeneous. Gender and its interaction with poverty is largely neglected, a serious omission in a report that devotes so much space to discussing power, accountability, governance and voice.

The WDR has yet to clarify what is meant by equity – does it mean making the poor better off than they are currently, or reducing inequalities between income groups? Depending on which definition is adopted as a policy objective, the policy interventions would look very different – for example, whether a flat rate or graded rate should be charged for using a service.

Submitted by: Patrick Watt -- June 10,2003
Country of Residence: United Kingdom
Country of Origin/Citizenship: United Kingdom
Institutional Affiliation: ActionAid
Occupation: Policy adviser
Language:

Women and Water Services

An important aspect of the distribution of water services that has been only vaguely alluded to in the text is that of the necessary involvement of women in the planning and process of service provisions.

Women are the most vulnerable group, along with children, in impoverished areas, since they are directly responsible, among other community services, for the daily collection of drinking water, its quality, and household sanitation conditions.

Their labor and effort in maintaining family and community health, through the procurement and management of locally available services, is often unaccounted for in assessments of social welfare.

Women are uniquely ‘qualified’ to understand the effect of participation and voice in improving accountability and service quality and the effects of service pricing on overall community health.

Submitted by: Stephen Gasteyer and Rahul Vaswani -- June 05,2003
Country of Residence: United States
Country of Origin/Citizenship: India
Institutional Affiliation: RCAP
Occupation: Rural Development Analysts
Language:

In its analysis of providers, the WDR doesn’t explicitly mention the issues arising from large transnational private providers of water services. It is important to understand the significance of such providers who can have a local frontline face, but a discreet and often untraceable head office.

Over 96% of the world drinking water is provided by public providers. (Source: Vivendi estimates 1999.) Of the remaining 3.6%, the world top two private sector water companies, Vivendi and Suez, control 70% of the market.

While there is no empirical evidence to suggest that the entry of such private providers into earlier publicly controlled areas has improved water services, especially for the poor, there is considerable evidence that they have often been difficult to hold accountable to policy-provider compacts and to clients.

These providers often obtain long concessions (20-40 year) under agreements with little or no performance requirements (this is becoming increasingly incumbent under the provisions of Article XVI of GATS), operate with a monopoly over distribution of services, raise prices of water services to enable rapid cost recovery and provide no technology transfer or enable little, if any, capacity building of local clients towards service quality management and improvement.

This leads to a break in compacts. The recent cases of the cancellation of United Water Resources Inc.’s (a Suez owned company) contract in Atlanta and the strongly held ownership of Indianapolis’s water services system by the city’s municipality (ICIJ 2003) are examples of this.

Submitted by: Stephen Gasteyer and Rahul Vaswani -- June 05,2003
Country of Residence: United States
Country of Origin/Citizenship: India
Institutional Affiliation: RCAP
Occupation: Rural Development Analysts
Language:

One of the worst points about water (and electricity?) provision in developing countries that should indeed get considerable coverage in the WDR is the link between access to these goods and political clout.

It is a well-known fact that supposedly 'social' tariffs (i.e. artificially low tariffs) frequently do not end up benefiting the poor because, as a consequence of the budgetary pressures created by the social tariffs, the good in question is rationed by the government. Hence, access goes first (and often exclusively) to those who are rich and / or powerful enough to secure it for themselves.

So far so bad. But what I do not understand is why the standard solutions advocated by the Bank always tend to include private provision of the goods in question. While it is clear to me from the above situation that subsidies would need to be cut under such circumstances, unsubsidised water or other services could nevertheless be provided within intelligent public service 'regimes', no?

Submitted by: Yvonne Pagenkopf -- June 02,2003
Country of Residence: Germany
Country of Origin/Citizenship: Germany
Institutional Affiliation:
Occupation:
Language:

Accountability

One of the key words used in the WDR draft is the concept of accountability. Basically the idea in the WDR draft is to provide accountability through market mechanisms and decentralisation.

There are certainly reasons to talk about how to improve accountability. Two major ways of doing this are to strengthen local democracy and to help parents organise their own associations.

Mechanisms for parental influence is in most countries weak. That being said, the need to mobilise parents is increasingly acknowledged, and interest in establishing different types of parent organisations (sometimes referred to as PTAs: parent-teacher associations) is also growing. Yet, this interest is seldom linked to offering parents any influence, but more often in the belief that these organisations should play a role in funding schools. They are expected to collect money and through different actions contribute to the financing of their school. It is often difficult to find parents who are prepared to do this work and who have the skills necessary to do it successfully. Because of this, it is likely that many PTAs are in reality run by the school’s head teachers.

In Pakistan, the government has started to organise courses for parents active in PTAs. Officially it claims that these associations are created everywhere, but critics argue that they seldom function very well (Education International, 1999a).

Another problem with achieving greater parental influence is how to put this into practice at the national level. Many governments are more interested in creating local associations than in giving parents a voice at the national level. Outside the industrialised countries there are few examples of well-functioning national parent organisations. Promising developments have been observed, however, in some French-speaking African countries, where parent organisations have created a forum for exchange and action: the Fédération Africaine des Associations de Parents d'Elèves et d'Etudiants (FAPE). Generally the co-operation between parent organisations and teacher unions works well.

To improve parents' influence in education, it is necessary to review teacher education and ensure that teachers have had adequate, high quality training, enabling them to fulfil their responsibilities, including skills necessary to work together with parents. It is not the role of parents, however, to have a direct say about hiring and firing of teachers. This is the role of legal employers.

Submitted by: -- May 30,2003
Country of Residence: Belgium
Country of Origin/Citizenship: Belgium
Institutional Affiliation: Education International
Occupation:
Language: