Small-Scale Private Service Providers of Water Supply and Electricity: A Review of Incidence, Structure, Pricing, and Operating Characteristics
By Mukami Kariuki, J. Schwartz. 2005
175 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This paper summarizes the key findings and conclusions of a literature review of small-scale private service providers (SPSPs) of water supply and electricity conducted over a six-month period in 2003. It draws on more than 400 documents-including journals, articles, reports, case studies and project reports-which have been disaggregated and referenced in a publicly available database. SPSPs appear most prevalent in countries with low coverage levels, ineffective public utilities that provide inadequate or partial services, and remote, difficult-to-access regions. SPSPs are especially prevalent in post-conflict countries and others with weak or failed states. Of the countries for which evidence of SPSPs was available, at least half fall into this category. SPSP provision of networked services appears to be significantly higher for electricity than for water supply. Most SPSPs identified through the literature are single-purpose entities established for the express purpose of delivering water supply or electricity. SPSPs take a variety of organizational forms, both for-profit and non-profit. As such, they are established for a variety of reasons, including: to meet consumer demand, respond to crises, or as part of larger business ventures. The technology used may extend upstream from distribution services to the means for producing or generating water supply or electricity, so capital needs vary accordingly. The majority of SPSPs have fewer than 50 employees and usually fewer than 10. A lack of affordable financing is a constraint for most SPSPs, which fund investments mainly through their own earnings and savings, loans from friends and family, and money borrowed from formal and informal lenders.
Subfields: Nutrition and Dietetics, Strategy and Management, Urban Studies
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/594464c60ef6a3c6c6834a140510610150ce02b2
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In Nutrition and Dietetics
In Strategy and Management
In Urban Studies
Citations in the corpus
- Current Debates on Infrastructure Policy (2007, unknown): “In a recent survey, Kariuki and Schwartz (2005) identified 23 African countries where small‐ scale providers are supplying different kinds of services.”
- Decent Living Emissions: A Conceptual Framework (2012, background): “A survey of 47 countries by the World Bank shows that average costs per m(3) of water delivered to households varies by a factor of 10 between that provided by utilities over distribution systems and that provided by small-scale vendors with tankers and carts [68].”
- Cities in Bad Shape: Urban Geometry in India (2020, background): “32Recall that the median value of the disconnection index is 2.6 kilometers. centralized grid, while electricity and water access in urban India is also granted through decentralized means such as small-scale private service providers (Kariuki and Schwartz 2005).”