By promoting growth and markets, the private sector creates improved livelihoods. In Venezuela, for example, millions escaped from poverty - and 90 percent of the jobs created for them were in the private sector, not public. By providing power, water, roads and telecommunications, the private sector allows governments to redirect resources to social spending. In one South Asian country, for example, the cash required to keep a public utility afloat was more than 1.7 times the expenditure on education, or five times the expenditure on health. Creating public-private partnerships.
Governments can design bids that make services increasingly available to the poor.
This can be done through concessions that call for bidders to provide services that they won't otherwise provide to the poor. In one country, despite significant expenditure and subsidies to public monopolies, only four percent of the population is connected to the power grid and six percent have access to water. By contrast, the privatization of the Manila water supply system is an example of a creative public-private partnership. A concessionaire was chosen to provide public faucets in slum communities where the poor had previously bought trucked-in water at high prices. The government accepted lower concession revenues in return for providing drinking water to nearly 68,000 low-income families.