Community-partnered contracts in developing countries

There is a growing recognition in developing countries ofcommunity-based infrastructure procurement and itspotential to achieve sustainable development. The advantagesof such an approach are that it encourages participativenegotiation of activities and speedierimplementation, the use of local resources, skills andappropriate technology, and entrepreneurship withincommunities. These wider socio-economic impacts arisingfrom community-partnered micro-projects can leadto more sustainable infrastructure through meeting localstakeholders’ needs, community empowerment and capacitybuilding. This paper describes the development anduse of performance indicators for community-contractedurban infrastructure provision in low-income communitiesin India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. In particular, theseindicators refer to the dimensions of time and cost; somekey performance yardsticks are also proposed. The urbaninfrastructure and services referred to in these cases arethe facilities needed for water and sanitation provision,access roads, street lighting and solid waste management.In general, it was found that costs for community-contractedmicro-projects were normally very close to beingon target. The quality of infrastructure and service provisionalso tended to be superior to that envisioned by localgovernment engineers. However, project duration generallyexceeded the target but was still comparable to conventionalcontracts. The overall performance of thecommunity-partnered micro-projects was found to becomparable or better than the conventional micro-contracts;in addition, the performance of these projects interms of socio-economic elements was likely to far exceedthat of the conventional micro-projects.