#1399 1993 · Phnom Penh Water Supply Authority · Urban water utility
Phnom Penh cut water losses from 72% to 6% by metering all and paying above the bribe
问题
In 1993 under a third of Phnom Penh's water was billed; collectors rigged accounts; staff sold connections for bribes
背景
After war and the Khmer Rouge years, the Phnom Penh Water Supply Authority served 20 percent of the city. Less than 30 percent of the water produced was billed, and 87 percent of connections were unmetered, estimated bills bearing no relation to use. Bill collectors manipulated accounts; a new connection cost about $1,000 in bribes; staff earned around $20 a month — an environment where, a later evaluation noted, 80 percent of employees worked less than two hours a day, and corruption was not a moral failure but the real wage.
Ek Sonn Chan, a water engineer from inside the utility, was appointed general director in 1993. Royal Decree No. 52 of 1996 granted PPWSA administrative and financial autonomy with a board and the power to propose tariffs. Donor money followed — but the sequence ran the other way: staff, meters and billing were fixed first, and tariffs were raised in announced steps only after service visibly improved, with a lifeline block for small users and connection subsidies for the poor.
换别人会怎么做
Sign a privatization concession or take the big rehabilitation loan first, deferring tariff and staff reform as politically impossible — but money poured into an unmetered, unbilled network disappears into it, and the corrupt bill collector was, functionally, the payment system.
他们看到了什么
Everyone expected money to fix the utility. It fixed meters, billing and payroll first — then the money followed on its own terms. Performance before finance: donors fund what already works, not what promises to reform.
那一手
Corrupt managers were replaced with young professionals (reassigned, not mass-fired), quarterly evaluations brought bonuses and dismissal, and from 2001 salaries rose about 20 percent a year until they rivalled the private sector — funded by recovered revenue. Every connection was metered by 2001, Class C volumetric meters replacing estimates; the network was divided into 41 monitored zones; automated accounting and billing removed the human bill collector, lifting the collection ratio to 99.9 percent. Tariffs rose stepwise to full cost recovery, with households using under 7 cubic metres a month paying 60 percent of cost and poor households receiving 30 to 100 percent connection-fee subsidies.
为什么管用
You cannot bill what you do not measure: universal metering turned water from an open-access commons into a metered commodity, and the 41 monitored zones localized every leak. Automation removed the collection point where corruption lived. Paying staff at private-sector rates made the job an asset worth protecting — a salary a bribe must outbid — and the recovered revenue itself funded the raises. Sequencing built the politics: tariffs could rise only because clean 24-hour supply had already arrived, and the lifeline block plus connection subsidies split the poor away from any anti-tariff coalition. Full cost recovery then produced retained earnings, which reduced dependence on donors and made the next expansion self-financed.
值了多少
By 2008 unaccounted-for water was 6.19% (from 72%), supply 24-hour, collection near 100%, audited profit every year since 1993, no subsidy
什么时候会失灵
Nothing starts without a director enjoying real political cover and an autonomy decree — the evaluation's blunt conclusion was that leadership and governance, not capital, are the binding constraint almost everywhere. Paying well without performance dismissal recreates a cosier patronage machine. Where losses are physical — old pipes — rather than commercial, staff reform alone cannot reach 6 percent. And the model's dependence on one durable management team makes succession its exposed flank.
后来呢
PPWSA became the reference case that a public utility can reform internally before taking external money or privatizing; utilities across the developing world sent study delegations, Ek Sonn Chan received the 2006 Ramon Magsaysay Award, and the evaluation concluded that governance, not scarcity or poverty, is what fails elsewhere.
资料来源
- [1]Water Supply of Phnom Penh: An Example of Good Governance (Reflections Paper, Int'l Journal of Water Resources Development 26(2))Third World Centre for Water Management, 2010thirdworldcentre.org
- [2]Phnom Penh Water Supply Authority: Internal Reforms Fuel PerformanceAsian Development Bank, 2008adb.org