Abstract
The Tennessee Valley Authority and Rural Electrification Administration became the World Bank's template of choice for development projects. They remained so due to both institutional inertia within the World Bank and path dependent thinking of electrification as a means to economic growth. Consequently, electrification took the front seat for development projects worldwide, extending to rural areas, while water remains perceived as an amenity, rather than as economic infrastructure. This explains in part why the Government of Rwanda has prioritised rural electrification over rural clean drinking water in spite of recent evidence showing that rural electrification does not deliver growth in the Rwandan context.
Highlights
University College London, Bartlett School of Construction and Project Management. 1-19 Torrington Pl, London WC1E 7HB article info
This explains in part why the Government of Rwanda has prioritised rural electrification over rural clean drinking water in spite of recent evidence showing that rural electrification does not deliver growth in the Rwandan context
Stage 4: Rinse and repeat – internationalisation of Option B Multiple strategic goals motivated Cold War US governments to export the successes of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and Rural Electrification Administration (REA) abroad: a desire to create shared prosperity to prevent a repeat of the conditions that resulted in the Second World War (Mason and Asher, 1973, p. 15; Sharma, 2010, p. 33, 2017, p. 7), as well as to sustain the growth of the US economy growth by having bigger markets to which it could export; and a desire to limit the influence of the Soviet Union during the Cold War,11 both as a political end in itself (Craig and Porter, 2006) as well as a means to protect the USA’s potential export markets
Summary
A substantial portion of Rwanda’s rural population is without either electricity or access to drinking water free of faecal contamination The latter has had a human cost: the incidence of repeated infection with diarrhoea among children aged 12-23 months was 22% and 49% of 18-23 month olds showed stunted growth in 2014-15 (Government of Rwanda - National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda et al 2016, p.137). The extent of adaption has been limited, with the Government of Rwanda investing heavily in rural electrification without first having even provided universal access to drinking water in Rwanda’s main towns, where doing so would be more economical than in rural areas. This seems to have had the desired effect of increasing the Government of Rwanda’s attention to rural access to potable water
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