He who pays the piper

Abstract

One of the many proverbs thrown at me when I was kid was ‘he who pays the piper calls the tune’. In modern marketing parlance that might be translated into ‘the customer is king’. A study of the private rural piped water business recently launched by the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Program has shown this to be an important factor in efforts to improve the access of poor people to safe drinking water. (An earlier blog has discussed the results of the companion study on rural sanitation.)