Perhaps the foremost lesson of poverty reduction activities concerns the process of delivery - specifically, ensuring that the decision-making over the nature and scope of services (or other interventions) responds to the demands of the poor themselves, and not to the factors and stakeholders that determine supply. In relation to basic service delivery, the importance of facilitating service improvements that are demand-led cannot be overestimated. Decades of improvements to slums and squatter settlements have proved unsustainable because infrastructure was provided to low-income residents through a process that did not involve them in decision-making.
In order to establish the level of service demand, a variety of tools and techniques were developed that enabled governments, agencies and funders to know what the urban poor needed and how it could best be delivered. Experience showed that the poor must become participants in rather than beneficiaries of the process, and that development processes must be designed with in-built flexibility to ensure that participation could be achieved. The participation of poor communities is essential to ensure efficacy and sustainability in project ends, and to maximise the benefits of project means.4
Despite the wide dissemination of the benefits of involving communities in development, and the few initiatives that are currently including communities, a vast number of PPPs have been and continue to be developed without this participation. Notwithstanding the work of more recent innovative pilots conducted on a small scale, most PPPs in water and sanitation (and many in solid waste) developed over the last decade have excluded the poor from the process. Operators argue that they respond to consumer demand. Low-income groups, like their middle- or high-income urban neighbours, are treated as customers, but most do not differentiate between the poor and the non-poor. Few have taken account of the fundamentally different nature of a poor customer base, and many are unfamiliar with the characteristics of (and constraints on) poor households. Even among those municipalities experienced in and aware of the benefits of community participation, many have not effectively merged private sector participation with community participation in service partnerships.
Yet those innovative PPPs (see, for example, Boxes 7.3 and 7.6) that have incorporated communities into the delivery process expose the benefits that participation brings. At the same time they draw attention to the need for operators to change standardised methods: to adapt to differing levels of demand within a community, and to provide different levels of service or means of payment. They also draw attention to the possibility for increasing community involvement to reduce costs, and increasing ownership by providing labour to the operator and overseeing simple construction tasks.
The critical role of communities in PPPs focused on the poor is developed in detail in Chapter 6.