Partnerships for rural water supply : The SiSAR and Central cases

Rural water supply represents one of the largest challenges for the universalization of water access. Currently, 8 out of 10 people that lack access to basic water supply services are located in rural areas. The challenge to supply water to rural areas is composed of complex factors of different natures, from issues related to scale and density to those related to accountability, community involvement, and legitimacy. To deal with those, management structures have been elaborated, such as government-led, community-led, or privately operated. While those have been able to harvest some results, they have been the target of severe criticism and have failed individually. Partnerships have been seen as a potential way to integrate the strengths of the different management structures while mitigating the risks related to each of them. In this work, two partnership arrangements in Brazil, Central, and SiSAR, were analyzed to check whether the partnership has been able to impact service provision to rural areas. To analyze the partnership implementation, concepts such as organizational fit, risk-sharing, and value-generation were mobilized. The results show how specific partnership arrangements, with different degrees and levels of government involvement have been able to generate different results, in terms of long-term functionality (in the Central Case) and model expansion (in the SiSAR case). Also, it was perceived how the partnership structure has been able to elaborate a structure to execute capital and mitigate risks related to operational and financial aspects while bringing to the table risks related to the relationship between the different actors. Finally, the analysis of partnership arrangements selected, provided important discussion points towards the future development of structures to manage rural water supply and the potential of partnerships to be a solid response to this complex challenge