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Urban water services in Sub Saharan Africa: access, private sector involvement and technical paradigm.
Full text linkThe thesis analyses the water supply sector in the Sub Saharan African region, focusing on the challenges experienced by the water utilities to fulfil their mandates, in a context of rapid urbanization.
In September 2000, building upon a decade of major United Nations (UN) conferences and summits, world leaders came together at UN Headquarters in New York to adopt the Resolution A/RES/55/2, committing their nations to a new global partnership to reduce extreme poverty and setting out a series of time-bound targets - with a deadline in 2015 - that have become known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDG). The goal number 7 was “Ensure environmental sustainability” and it included the Target 7.C which is to “halve, by 2015, the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation”.
The water MDG is dramatically off track in Sub Saharan Africa, with only 64% of the population covered in 2012 instead of the expected 77.5% (WHO and UNICEF 2014). These poor performances are driven by urban areas, where the water supply coverage through household connections declined while the access through other improved sources, like public taps, private hand pumps and protected wells, hardly compensated for that.
This calls for a reconsideration of the policies implemented in the sector following the prescriptions of the neoliberal agenda for the sector. In the ‘80s and ‘90s policymakers from International Financial Institutions (IFIs) and donors agencies designed a set of recipes to address poor performances of the urban water services in the developing world. This happened in the context of structural adjustment policies, such as trade liberalization, labor market reforms, financial deregulation and privatization of State Owned Enterprises (SOE). In the water sector, these orientations were translated into decentralization, private sector participation, commercialization and corporatization of water utilities, with the shift of governments from providers to regulators.
The thesis studies some of the devices and solutions typically adopted by the reformed utilities and justified by the expectation of positive outcomes for the access to water by the poor
The work shows however that some of these devices gained a certain degree of autonomy from access goals and became a priority as such, to be pursued by water utilities regardless their impacts and interaction with key social dimensions. This phenomenon was in some cases favoured by a biased attitude of water sector practitioners, benchmarking regulation and donors.
The work highlights that in some cases the reform solutions do not contribute to the achievement of the declared objectives, while their implementation can divert scarce resources and attention from key sector priorities.
Cost recovery, Private Sector Participation and household level metering issues are analysed.
The work is organized in three parts.
The first part proposes a review of the main notions and issues addressed by water economics (chapter 1), with particular attention to developing countries.
The second part is divided into three chapters, closely linked together for their arguments but conceived as autonomous papers and characterized by different methodological approaches: the first is quantitative, the second and the third are more qualitative in nature and they include original findings from interviews on the Lilongwe Water Board, a water utility from Malawi.
The second chapter focuses on the problems of cost recovery and access to drinking water in Sub Saharan Africa. A model explaining the dynamics in water coverage which accounts for financial performances of utilities is proposed. The data set covers 25 countries in the Sub Saharan region from 1995 to 2012. The results suggest that the access to water depends upon financial results, but this relationship is not linear: with increasing returns for relatively low levels of cost recovery and decreasing returns beyond a certain threshold. The results are consistent with the literature about the risks associated with corporatization and neoliberal reforms in the water sector, and they provide some supporting quantitative evidence and recommendations for sector policies in the region.
The third chapter refers to the Light Private Sector Involvement initiatives in the Sub Saharan Africa water supply sector, considering in particular efficiency improvements, aid effectiveness and related policy implications. The study analyses the determinants that can incentivize or discourage the partners of light forms of Private Sector Involvement (PSI) initiatives to achieve the expected results in the water supply sector in the Sub Saharan Africa region. This is done through a review of case studies involving management and service contracts, which are the lightest and lower risk forms of public-private partnership. While five cases are taken from the available literature, the sixth includes contributions from original research on Lilongwe Water Board (Malawi). The chapter considers the incentives to perform for both the private and the public partner, as determined by the contracts and by the wider context. The incentives necessary for both parties to engage in the partnership are also considered, jointly with the costs of creating these preconditions. The study concludes that the allocation of risks and decision making power are among the drivers of poor performances by light PSI initiatives. Moreover, as most partnerships are financed by development projects, the study discusses the policy implications of promoting these PSI initiatives.
The fourth chapter analyses the priorities and tools for Water Demand Management in urban Africa, focusing on household level water metering. The study presents an analysis of the issues associated with water metering at household level by utilities in low income areas or informal settlements of Sub Saharan African cities. Metering is considered a key tool for water demand management and recommended as a good practice in the water supply sector but, while its benefits are clearly spelled out by donors and development agencies, its costs and shortcomings are seldom considered. The chapter analyses such challenges, based on the available literature and on an original case study on Lilongwe Water Board (Malawi). It is argued that the technical paradigm of metered household level connection can be in some cases a constraint to the connection of low income households, due to the high cost and complexity of the practices associated to this paradigm, while the benefits in terms of demand management are not straightforward. Some alternatives to universal household level metering are also identified.
Finally, in the last part of the work the findings from the studies presented are summarized and some conclusions and recommendations are drawn about the importance of better focusing on the priority of water access, encompassing a wider set of operational solutions
Does food import contribute to rising obesity in low‐ and middle‐income countries?
No full textSeveral studies show a positive association between the rise of obesity in developing countries and globalization, trade, and food trade, but most do not account for reverse causality between the prevalence of obesity and trade flows. Moreover, most studies adopt broad definitions of trade and food trade, notwithstanding the main effects of trade on obesity may pass through import of specific foods. We address these concerns by empirically investigating the impact of food import on obesity in a sample of 116 developing countries (2000–2016) and by focusing, particularly, on processed and sugar-rich food. This is done by controlling for other globalization-related factors and by correcting the bias stemming from potential reverse causality through a two-step approach instrumenting obesity with the average height of adult population. One main robust conclusion emerges: it is neither economic and cultural globalization nor general food import, but rather the import of processed and sugar-rich food, which contributes to increase obesity
Light Public-Private Partnerships in the water supply sector: Malawi and other case studies from Sub-Saharan Africa
No full textThe paper analyses light forms of Public-Private Partnership (PPP), namely management and service contracts, in the water supply sector of Sub-Saharan Africa, based on original research in Malawi and on a review of five additional case studies. We refer to information asymmetries and contract theory to explain the observed performances of the PPPs. The paper considers the incentives to engage in the partnership and to undertake a high effort level, jointly with the challenges preventing effort to translate into performances. The study concludes that some problems encountered by light PPP experiences are intrinsic to their incentive structure and discusses the policy implications of light PPPs promotion in the context of the Aid Effectiveness debate
Fed with import and starved by war: Estimating the consequences of the Russia-Ukraine conflict on cereals trade and global hunger
No full textThe fight against hunger has been confirmed as a global goal by the UN Agenda 2030 but the war between Russia and Ukraine is expected to create millions of new undernourished due, among others, to its impact on international trade in cereals, especially in wheat and maize. The present note represents a first effort to quantify such impact and its consequences on hunger in developing countries. This is done by (1) identifying the changes in trade flows of wheat and maize caused by the war; (2) computing the resulting variation in each developing country's cereals import openness; and (3) applying the most recent estimates of the relation between cereals import openness and the prevalence of undernourishment provided by the recent literature to obtain the corresponding change in the number of undernourished because of the war. Results show a huge impact on the number of new undernourished, which, however, becomes less dramatic when the analysis is limited to countries where maize or wheat are staples. Along with the Black Sea blockade, the main impact on hunger comes from the bans issued by Ukraine and other economies reacting to the crisis and it particularly hurts people in countries depending on few trading partners
Free to die: Economic freedoms and influenza mortality
Full text link: Seasonal influenzas are annually responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide, often because of insufficient care, which may depend on orientations of economic policy. Yet, the empirical evidence on the relations existing between policies based on different degrees of economic liberalism and flu mortality is still scarce. This paper contributes to filling the gap by proposing an empirical investigation into the effects of various dimensions of liberalism, proxied by the different components of the Fraser Index of Economic Freedom, on deaths from seasonal influenzas in a sample of 38 OECD countries observed from 1970 to 2018. A dynamic panel System-GMM estimator is used to alleviate endogeneity concerns, while alternative models, specifications and subsamples check the robustness of findings. Findings show that: a) not every component of economic freedom has an effect on flu mortality; b) more economic freedom not always means less or more deaths from flu. In particular, stronger protection of property rights and smaller government consumption are associated with higher flu mortality, which is instead lower when people and capital are freer to move. Such results give rise to policy considerations and contribute to inform policymakers about actions that can limit the mortality of a globally widespread disease like flu
Total trade, cereals trade and undernourishment: new empirical evidence for developing countries
Full text linkWhile trade policies are considered strategic to shape national food systems and promote food security, the ultimate impact of trade openness on hunger is still highly debated. Using a sample of 81 developing over the period 2001–2016 and principally focusing on the prevalence of undernourishment, this study provides new empirical evidence. Firstly, it estimates the impact of total trade differentiating the effects that pass through changes in real per capita income—i.e. on the economic access to food—from the residual effects that it directly has on the other dimensions of food security. Subsequently, it concentrates on cereals trade, that usually is the most affected by trade restrictions and the most correlated to undernourishment. Finally, it explores the different effects of cereals trade in terms of imports and exports. Three main conclusions emerge: (a) trade openness contributes to lower the prevalence of undernourishment in developing countries and most of this effect is not income-mediated but, rather, passes through the impacts that it directly has on the other dimensions of food security; (b) such impacts are mostly driven by the trade openness of the cereals sector where (c) its import component turns out to play the main role
Water Demand Management and Household Level Metering in Low-Income Areas of Urban Africa
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