Or.....give me plenty of reading for a long airplane ride tomorrow. I've downloaded this bonanza of information to my drive, and you have my thanks for all the time you invested.

Last - enough to spoil your weekend!!
F H Mughal

More ...
F H Mughal

More ...

F H Mughal

More....

F H Mughal

Dear Diane M. Kellogg,

I'm attaching some publications that will keep you busy during the weekend

Due to my slow internet, I'm attaching 3 per email.

Enjoy!
F H Mughal

Open source innovations encourage competition. Public-good or philanthropic grant funding (or government funding) that results in one enterprise holding commercial advantage will not bring price down, but only increases profit for that one enterprise. Grantors need to recognise this and only give grantees money for developing or testing innovations that do not give commercial advantage to them alone. This tests the "altrusim" of the applicant, their genuine motives. Once proven and accepted, an innovative product or service just needs the numbers to be crunched to invite private sector investment. The risk is around competitive edge and alternative innovations always threaten this. If price to the consumer comes down and the venture is profitable then the innovation is a game-changer. With open sourcing, the resulting competition invites competitive tendering for provision of the product or service.

cheers
Dean

DianeKellogg wrote: I see examples of endless negotiations to "get the price down" with the guiding principle being......."you shouldn't be making much of a profit off of serving the public good."

I have not really come across that argument much unless the service was actually subsidized with government funds (directly or indirectly) and then it makes a certain sense although the real argument is rather "you shouldn't be making much of a profit off government funds".

More often the argument is that private sector is unwilling to embrace economies of scale that would allow serving many more people at a lower price-point while still making more profit overall.
The problem here seems to be that such a scale up needs additional capital (for trucks etc.) that can not be borrowed for a reasonable interest rate in many countries and in the rare cases that it is available there are usually other even more profitable sectors to invest it into.

My working hypothesis is that we need both the government and the private sector, as you point out. Yet there seems to be plenty of reason to be concerned about how effective either can be on their own. AND concern about how effective partnerships can be. The general sentiment among SMEs is that if you can get along without any entanglements with governments, you'll be better off. They want to sell to customers. Government officials seem generally suspicious about the profit-motive in the private sector. I see examples of endless negotiations to "get the price down" with the guiding principle being......."you shouldn't be making much of a profit off of serving the public good."

That creates a stalemate. NGOs seem to be in the middle trying to work with both, but then you have the problem of directing resources to yet another industry (the NGO industry) without guaranteeing that the money really reaches the poor.

To All.....I'm taking in everything that's offered on this thread. Keep it coming.
Diane

Thanks for these references. I'm reading everything I can find.

Hello Diane,

For the private sector sanitation business in rural Malawi, please check out our work under a SHARE grant:

• Holm, R., Kasulo, V. and Wanda, E. Identification of funding mechanisms for private sector participation in the provision of rural household sanitation facilities, in Nkhata Bay District (Malawi). Sustainable Sanitation Practices, 2014, 20, pages 27-31.
• Holm, R., Wanda, E., Kasulo, V. and Gwayi, S. Identification of the potential opportunities, barriers, and threats within the sector in taking up sanitation as a business: rural sanitation in Nkhata Bay District (Malawi). Waterlines, 2014, 33:3, pages 269-274.

JKMakowka wrote: maybe the private sector that takes the role of a quasi-government for its salaried employees and other more affluent parts of the surrounding society that can buy themselves into the communities run more or less by the private sector. In addition there might be a role that the surrounding service "industries" have in catering to these more affluent communities.

No doubt that private sector can serve those who can and want to pay for good sanitation. But this does not bring us any closer to the "access to adequate and equitable sanitation and hygiene for all", which our governments have recently agreed to be the goal from now on...

I'm equally pessimistic about the prospect of governments and public institutions in many countries. But I think we should not fall in the trap and accepting that as a unchangeable fact, give up on the governmental systems and putting all our hopes in the private sector instead. It won't work. All experience so far show that private sector can work towards the good of all, but only under strong regulation. Without good regulation, the private sector will tend to serve only the rich, often on expense of the poor (e.g. wastewater collected from gated communities ends up in slums). But good regulation is possible only with functionning governments...