# **3.3 Historical context**

It is important to understand how current levels of coverage have been reached, an in particular the extent to which the greater volume of resources devoted to service expansion following the Peace Accords is reflected as faster growth of coverage.

# **_Expansion of electricity, water and sanitation_**

Historical trends show that the rate of increase of coverage accelerated after the major policy changes introduced in 1996<sup>14</sup> (Figure 3.2). For all three services (electricity, water and sanitation), coverage improved by close to 15 percentage points over the subsequent four years (1997-00) compared with just over 10 percentage points over the previous four years (1993-96)<sup>15</sup> . Clearly, it is difficult to attribute the causality for this acceleration to the Peace Accords and to the structural reforms introduced at that time. Other factorsnotably economic growth and urbanizationcould equally have been at work. Nonetheless, the fact that neither GDP per capita nor urbanization rates increased substantially over this period makes it more likely that the observed improvements were at least partially attributable to changes in the policy environment and increases in public investment<sup>16</sup> .

However, coverage statistics can be misleading because they confound growing numbers of connections with growing population. To disentangle these effects, Table 3.7 reports the absolute number of new connections made in the period before and after the Peace Accords. The results confirm that the rate of service expansion was in general about 50% higher in the years following the Peace Accords, and that these differences are statistically significant (in most cases at the 99% level). Furthermore, the acceleration of coverage was quite generalized affecting both urban and rural areas, as well as poor and non-poor populations. Moreover, the changes in the number of new connections per year were largest (in percentage terms) and most significant in the case of poor and rural populations.

On reflection, it is not entirely surprising that new connections went disproportionately to traditionally disadvantaged groups, since most other groups in society were already being served. Therefore, in order to detect whether there has really been an improvement in targeting of services towards socially excluded groups, it is necessary to normalize the number of new connections they received against the size of the corresponding unserved population in each group. In other words, it is necessary to compare the probability that an unserved household in any particular category would become connected during the period immediate preceding and following the Peace Accords (Table 3.8).

> 14 It is important to explain how this historical series was derived. Due to the paucity of earlier household surveys in Guatemala, the historical series is based on a question in the ENCOVI 2000 survey that asked households to recall the year in which they had first received these services. Hence, the accuracy of the historical trend is contingent on the accuracy of households’ recollection. It has been noted in the literature that respondent recall in household surveys can sometimes be affected by a phenomenon known as ‘telescoping’ whereby events are recalled as being more recent than they actually were. Such a phenomenon, if present, would create the impression that coverage growth had been more rapid in recent years.

> 15 Where possible coverage rates derived from the ENCOVI have been compared with official figures. In the case of electricity, the current estimated coverage of 70% coincides precisely with that reported by the Ministry of Energy. While rural water coverage of 54% is almost identical to that reported by UNEPAR.

16 Average GDP per capita was US$1,449 for 1993/96 and US$1,532 for 1997/00. While urbanization stood at an average of 38.6% for 1993/96 and 39.4% for 1997/00.

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