The Girl-Child and Government Service Provision.pdf - Tanzania ...

economies of scale of setting up water, electricity andsometimes hospitals make them very difficult to privatizewithout losing the efficiency benefits gained from naturalmonopoly. The public-good nature of health and education(some even argue, water) is what leads governments tomake the decision to provide these services to their citizens.Education, health and basic education should not beonly for those who can afford them, but they should beavailable for all. This concept puts the responsibility forproviding these basic services on the government. If thenatural monopoly were to be liberalized, then governmentmust be strong enough to ensure that there will be sufficientcompetitions in the market for water, electricity, educationand health. In remote villages of 100 to 1,000people, it would be quite difficult for more than one electricityor water company to compete for the market. If wewere to accept the logic that transferring public servicesto the private sector would produce more competitionand hence lower prices for the poor consumers, we wouldbe wrong. For example, Manila Metropolitan’s waterprivatisation gives us a picture of two wealthy and powerfulfamilies working with foreign companies to provideservices – without competition – to the people. Anotherexample of water privatisation can be found in Cochabamba,Bolivia, where foreign companies Bectel (US) andEdison (Italy) gained a 40-year concession to run theCochabamba’s water company. The citizens’ uprising inApril 2000 protesting water price increasing more than200 per cent is perhaps the most widely known exampleof peoples’ protest to privatisation of these once-publicservices.The report recognises that because of market failure, basicservices are a public responsibility. However, becausegovernments have failed the poor too, there is not muchleft but for the poor to take charge. The strong emphasison separating government policy-makers from serviceproviders leads one to conclude that the alternative proposedis to make the poor more powerful by cutting outthe government from providing services and thus puttingclients’ demands directly to the service providers(whether private contractors, community based organisationsor some combination). The report, however, failedto include a comprehensive framework for empowermentof the poor through a rights-based approach that wouldenable them to have political space to manoeuvre vis-à-vistheir governments.There is little indication of confidence in the WDR 2004 ina central government’s ability to provide services to itscitizens. Instead, trust is placed in the private sectors,which can provide the capital and the expertise needed toserve the poor. The proposed structural changes wouldplace more responsibility on the poor, asking them to takecharge of their own needs – without providing them financial,political and social support. While it seems like a positivestep to have trust and confidence in the poor to manageand bring their consumer power to bear on thecompanies, the move to empower the poor can fail completelyif there are budget constraints. The WDR 2004recognises that this “soft budget constraint” can weakenthe “relationships of voice and client power”. In placingconfidence in consumers’ power, who will provide thetechnical, financial and political support to strengthen thevoices of poor consumers?In addition to the inconclusive discussion of the powerrelations, the WDR 2004 addresses services as if they werenameless and faceless. For instance, the first sentence ofthe nearly 300-page document reads, “Too often, servicesfail poor people – in access, in quantity, in quality.” Thereport did not use “public services”, though it is obviousthrough later readings that the WDR 2004 attributed thefailure to serve the poor to incompetent governments andunmotivated public service workers. While the governmentrole in providing services is often unclear, accordingto the WDR 2004, the responsibility of making serviceswork nonetheless rests on them. The difficulties faced bydeveloping countries’ governments are not well understood.The reality of insufficient funds and budgetary cuts– sometimes in response to recommendations and/orcommitments to reform in order to meet the requirementsfor loans from multilateral institutions such as theWorld Bank and the IMF – are not discussed. The Bank,through its loans to developing countries, often attachesconditionalities that require a government to divest itsproperties, such as water and electric companies, in orderto free the market and reduce the government’s fiscalburdens. This supply-side approach to policy-makingusually leaves the employees, often among the poorest inthe country, out in the cold. A more responsible andperhaps “people friendly” approach would be to analyzeboth the demand and supply for public services and toopen the discussion to both sides of the markets bybringing in the consumers and producers before a governmentmakes a unilateral decision – particularly onethat would put it in a more favourable light with themultilateral financial institutions. Joseph Stiglitz, the 2001Nobel Prize–winning economist, calls it “balancing out thediscussion.” 9The Girl-Child and Government Service Provision 83