Investing in Water Infrastructure

 From the World Bank and their excellent resource library on public-private-partnerships - White Paper, November 2012, Investing in Water Infrastructure: Capital, Operations, and Maintenance - link.
 

A summary of the paper:

The paper seeks to synthesize the extensive body of literature on this subject into a broad overview, providing some examples of the historical trends in financing, and taking lessons learned from developed to developing countries. Most of the published literature on this topic emphasizes the need for additional financial resources to respond to increasing demand for services. Furthermore, the studies are limited primarily to the water supply and sanitation sector and rely heavily on illustrating means of increasing private sector participation and private financing. In contrast, this paper defines new challenges in the wake of the recent global financial crisis and provides insight into improving the efficacy of water supply, sanitation, and irrigation infrastructure finance from public and private sources. Given that in developing countries around 75 percent of investments in water are from public resources (loans, grants, technical assistance), this paper emphasizes the importance of efficiencies in the investment and monitoring of public spending. In many instances, additional financial resourceswill not necessarily result in increased access and better services, but efficiency improvements will reduce overall financing needs; a crucial factor in this era of financial