ABSTRACT
This chapter is written for a government official whose responsibility is to manage a program to finance projects for utilities. It examines sources of external funding for such programs with a view to the most likely and most reliable sources of funding for utility projects. The United Nations has estimated that the cost of reaching the Millennium Development Goal of halving the number of people without access to clean water or basic sanitation by 2015 is an additional 100 billion USD per year. There are sources of funding for environmental projects. The chapter discusses the following four topics as sources of funding for environmental utility and other utility type of funding: national budgets, international financial institutions, donors, and private capital. In every country, the environment must compete for scarce central government funds with such high priority issues as national defense, food, public health, education, housing and economic development.
