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How to Improve Access to Piped Water in Rural Areas? Evidence from User Associations in Brazil

Description of the project:
Rural areas are significantly lagging behind in terms of access to piped water in almost all developing and transition countries. In the past fifty years, several institutional approaches and development strategies have been applied to address this issue. For several years, development experts and donor agencies have claimed that participatory approaches like water user associations that implement and manage their own small-scale supply system are best suited in order to increase access rates to water in rural areas in a sustainable way. This paper compares the increases in access rates to piped water in rural Brazil under two different governance models of small-scale supply systems. It finds that the implementation of small-scale supply systems that are operated and maintained by water user associations leads to significantly higher increases in access rates in rural areas than comparable systems implemented and operated by local governments. The latter show no difference in access rate increases if compared to municipalities without specific rural projects. This result is interesting as it shows differences between two project types that are both closer to the users than centralized systems. This project suggests that an accountability channel could explain the differences in performance. In municipalities where a social group was requesting a new system before the local government started implementation and therefore awareness of government action was higher, the increase in access rates is comparable to the increase in municipalities with user association projects. The same is true if local media is present or political competition in local elections is higher. In order to overcome the endogeneity problem, a difference-in-difference estimator is applied using kernel matching. The treatment effects are robust to various specification changes and tests for structural differences between treatment and control group. The results show that decentralized water supply does not automatically lead to better results if accountability is low. Projects involving the users of the new infrastructure lead to better performance.

contact person: Dipl.-Volksw. Julia Alexa Barde
Phone: 0761 203-9327
Email: julia.alexa.barde@vwl.uni-freiburg.de
Runtime:
Start of project: 01.06.2011
End of project: 31.08.2014
Project Management:
Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg
Schulze G

Actual Research Report

Contributors:
  • Barde J
Keywords:
    access to piped water, water user associations, rural water supply
project-related publications: