Results

Results in Water Supply & Sanitation

Countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have achieved impressive progress on water supply and sanitation with support from the World Bank. Recent examples include:

Brazil

Community Participation and Low Cost Technology: Bringing Water Supply and Sanitation to the Brazil. From 1988 to 1996, the PROSANEAR project supported the scaling up of a new approach to delivering WSS services to the urban poor in Brazil. The approach combined cost effective technologies with community participation. The project provided a million poor people with piped water supply and sanitation. It also contributed to building stronger communities and showed how WSS can be an integral part of local area development plans.

Ceará Urban Development & Water Resource Management Project. Under the second of three water modernization projects for Ceará State, approximately 40 localities with a population of about 400,000 benefited directly by gaining access to water.

Water Quality and Pollution Control Project. In the Guarapiranga basin in São Paulo State, 45,869 households got new connections to sanitary sewers, 55,000 inhabitants of urban agglomerations were provided with wastewater treatment, and 3 million inhabitants of the São Paulo Metropolitan Region received better quality drinking water.  In the Alto Iguaçu basin in Paraná State, pollution loads were reduced by expanding sanitary sewerage coverage from 45% to 50% and by increasing wastewater treatment from 17% to 64%.  The construction of the Irai Reservoir assured 1.6 m3/s of additional supply, benefiting 700,000 inhabitants.

Colombia

Local Solutions Improve Water Supply and Sanitation Services in Colombia (63kb pdf). The government of Colombia has been a pioneer in adopting sound water sector policies, and has made substantial progress in the expansion of water supply and sanitation.

Santafe 1 Water Supply and Sewerage Rehabilitation Project. Water and sewerage services were provided to 2 million additional (mostly poor) inhabitants of Bogotá, thus satisfying 100% of demand for water services and 90% of demand for sanitation services. The Bogotá water supply and sewerage systems were made safer through the construction of a tunnel to convey treated water from Bogotá’s main treatment plant to the city and through the rehabilitation of the second largest water treatment plant.

Ecuador

Visible Service Improvements Facilitate Reforms in Town Water Supply: PRAGUAS in Ecuador. In 2001, the government of Ecuador with financing from the World Bank started assisting municipalities and local communities to carry out the Rural and Small Town Water Supply and Sanitation Project (PRAGUAS). Up till 2005, PRAGUAS has improved WSS services for over 250,000 people. The town component of the project supports municipalities which are willing to make their utilities more autonomous and to raise tariffs to obtain quick service improvements and choose their own management models. PRAGUAS has become the government’s primary vehicle for addressing challenges in the water supply and sanitation sector.

Guyana

Water Supply Technical Assistance and Rehabilitation Project. As a result of the interventions under this project, more than 170,000 people received safe water, raising the percentage of population with access to treated water from 36% in 2001 to 45% in 2003.


Updated June 2006