Water and a Green Economy in Latin America and the Caribbean

Water in the Green Economy in Practice: Towards Rio+20
ply side, EPM has received almost 20 million dollars in public investment for water service
provision.
Social impacts: The initiative has benefitted some 700 thousand users and addressed social
inequities in the region.
Scaling up and relevance for developing countries
To address the access problem, most developing countries have copied models from elsewhere
in the pursuit of higher standards of living. But experience shows that due to different
social, economic, legal and cultural conditions between countries, models cannot
simply be transplanted with success guaranteed. It is therefore necessary to identify common
factors from which the transferability of an approach can be inferred.
Opportunities for the future
EPM has recently hired a consulting service to assess delinquent accounts and effectiveness
of EPM tools in reaching public services universalisation. The main conclusion
of the study was that current initiatives offered by EPM to vulnerable users are achieving
good results, but in order to help people living under vulnerable conditions (less than
5% of EPM target population) move up in the social scale, the following changes were
needed:
restructuring existing initiatives and creating new and complementary tools (such as insurance
mechanisms against shocks like death, illness or accident);
focalizing strategies leading to the development of differentiated options according to
users’ vulnerability levels (measured by poverty level and delinquent account risk); and,
collaboration in efforts with other actors concerned with the situation of vulnerable
population.
In addition to local and national governments, there are international agencies, nongovernmental
organisation and private entities that allocate resources and are interested
in implementing programs to improve social welfare. Furthermore, more efforts must be
made to link EPM actions to local and national policies for poverty reduction in order to
concentrate focalisation strategies in the same population and improve their effectiveness.
Lessons learnt from implementation
Know your target population well. Programs targeting the poor must be designed
on the basis of a thorough analysis of the beneficiaries’ conditions and their local particularities
in order to structure flexible and custom-made options for social improvement.
This requires interdisciplinary study of economic, social and psychology
WaterandaGreenEconomy
Case studies from the region
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