Africa Water, Sanitation & Hygiene Africa water, Sanitation Mar- Apr 2015 Vol.10 No.2 | Page 20

Domestic Private Sector Participation (DPSP) Initiative

Globally, 748 million people do not have access to improved drinking water sources and 2.5 billion people lack access
to improved sanitation. To improve access to improved water and sanitation, developing country governments are
increasingly looking to the domestic private sector because the public sector alone lacks the resources and capacity to
provide universal access to water and sanitation. Our interest in the domestic private sector is because the people outside
from public service coverage turn to self-supply or alternative sources. For these people, the entities assisting them
are local private sector. These domestic private sector actors play an important role in providing wider and more costeffective access, particularly to the poorest in in peri-urban, small towns, and rural areas. WSP’s DPSP works to better
understand and further assist the domestic private sector participants to maximize the impact of their involvement.
To stimulate domestic private sector participation, the Water and Sanitation Program:
• Promotes access to finance among “unbanked” populations
• Develops business models for the poor
• Supports public-private partnerships (PPPs) in rural, small towns and sanitation focused on the poor.

Infographic: Expanding Access to Water to the Poor through the Domestic Private
Sector
Today, 2.5 billion people lack access to basic sanitation and at least 780 million people lack access to safe drinking water.
This causes thousands of children to die each day and hundreds of billions of dollars in global economic losses every
year.
With so many people lacking access to these basic services, developing countries have an enormous challenge ahead. It
calls for a massive increase in the roll out of water and sanitation services, both in urban and in rural areas. This will
require significant investment, as well as improvements in management of the utilities providing these services.
Experience around the world shows that both the public and private sector can deliver affordable, sustainable, high
quality water and sanitation services, which has more to do with factors such as the capacity and financial sustainability
of the service provider and whether there’s a reasonable regulatory and institutional framework in place.
In many places where public services do not reach people, governments engage private sector or community based
organizations to reach those unreached. By helping governments to create a better enabling environment for these
entities, the World Bank Group helps affordable and better services to reach those people, while also strengthening their
demand for better services in the longer term.