Identifying Traditional and Non-traditional Mechanisms for Reaching the Poor in Infrastructure Services
The improvement of infrastructure services has proven to be a powerful tool in poverty alleviation initiatives. Providing people with access to basic and reliable infrastructure services are tools for improving their standard of living and rising their productivity-thus endowing them with the opportunity for growth. This work aims to document the existing traditional and non-traditional mechanisms used by Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) to reach the poor in infrastructure access and affordability, and to provide factual anecdotal case studies that represent this situation at a country, community, and utility specific/sensitive level. The specific objectives are: 1) to identify traditional and alternate mechanisms for targeting the poor or those designed by the poor in order to gain access to and maintain infrastructure services; and b) to design a framework of analysis in order to understand and analyze the various components that account for the traditional and non-traditional tools used to reach the poor (including social tariffs, alternative technology, community driven and managed activities, etc). Overall, the goal of this report is to provide a comprehensive description of pro-poor infrastructure practices at the regional level and to present various case studies that account for the heterogeneity of pro-poor mechanisms in LAC whether traditional or alternate/innovative.