Today, Olive Kabatwairwe, CoST Africa Regional Manager, spoke at Water Integrity Network (WIN) event “Public-Private Partnership reforms in water and sanitation: best practices.” This event, with 50+ people in attendance, explored how the integrity of Public-Private Partnerships can be ensured, and the roles of civil society and regulators in developing and maintaining accountability mechanisms. 

During this webinar, Olive discussed CoST’s recent work focused on sharing private sector views. Olive highlighted the results from Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, Malawi, Mozambique and Ethiopia including: 

• 47% of the private sector worry about project delays
• Only 29% of the private sector trust public officials 
• Only 20% have faith in contract management 

Olive also shared common insights across Africa and Latin America, including a shared perception that projects fall short of meeting user needs and corruption being viewed as a challenge. Our private sector portal was also showcased. 

Questions that Olive received focused on addressing private challenges, to which Olive emphasised on the importance of access to good quality data, rebuilding trust, and capacity building – these are key areas of our members’ work. Another question was around sustainability of investments, where Olive emphasised on our new data standard modules, which can help safeguard investment loss and help track finances.

This session also explored how PPPs differed across countries, South Africa and Brazil to Tanzania, Zambia and other countries. It also explored what strong accountability, strong regulation and government public financial management capacity to ensure fairer, more sustainable, and effective deal means in practice. 

This event strengthens CoST’s ongoing relationship with WIN, which has included co-creating framework methodologies, pilot projects and shared panels. It also builds on CoST’s work in the WASH sector, including the work of member Guatemala in furthering social accountability. CoST members in Africa who have also worked on projects in the water sanitation sector include Uganda, Ghana and Malawi.