PPIAF’s poverty reduction goals are most challenging in rural and peri-urban communities that still lack access to basic infrastructure services. Private investment in public infrastructure has tended to concentrate in urban areas because of the likelihood that users can pay at least some of the full costs of service. Infrastructure services in rural areas have traditionally been heavily subsidized because these users are much less able to pay for these costs. As a result, even where infrastructure networks exist, many households remain unconnected, demonstrating that the physical rollout of networks is not the only barrier to universal access. In many countries, the private sector remains uninterested in rural infrastructure projects because high subsidy requirements mean that governments, rather than customers, must pay most of the service costs.
Difficulties with rural and peri-urban service provision are underscored by historical data on changes in service coverage. Despite significant investment in infrastructure provision over the past 20 years, the percentage of populations covered by the provision of household services such as piped water, electricity, and landline telephones has not markedly increased. At the current rate, universal access to these basic services in Sub-Saharan Africa is more than 50 years away. Coverage expansion has been weakest in rural areas, where access to infrastructure services has always been significantly lower than in urban areas. Population dispersion in rural areas—where population densities are sometimes less than 15 people per square kilometer—means that the per capita cost of providing infrastructure is double that of doing so in densely populated cities.
The technical assistance supported by PPIAF and its Sub-National Technical Assistance (SNTA) program uses innovative approaches to scale up access to services for underserved populations across basic infrastructure sectors. PPIAF’s upstream technical assistance focuses on service expansion by designing legal and regulatory frameworks, conducting options studies, and preparing pre-feasibility and feasibility assessments—all of which aim to enable and encourage private participation in, and financing of, universal access infrastructure programs, and ultimately facilitate public-private partnership arrangements based on cost-reflective pricing and/or results-based subsidies.
Please see our slideshows on rural electrification and irrigation for more information.
