ALTERNATIVE METHODOLOGY FOR EVALUATION OF THE PERFORMANCE OF BASIC SANITATION COMPANIES:

APPLICATION OF FACTOR ANALYSIS

Abstract

Basic sanitation constitutes one of the indicators of quality of life, supported by measures that qualify and quantify aspects of urbanization and access to urbanity, and has been making up the political agenda of developing countries, especially Brazil. In the country, the referred sector has been characterized by the low rate of coverage and quality of service provision, as well as the drop in investments, mainly due to the contingency of resources and the inability of the State Sanitation Companies to absorb credit. Basic (Cesbs). Allied to this situation, the high rate of urbanization has contributed to the worsening of the population's quality of life and, mainly, of people belonging to the lowest income socioeconomic stratum. Such a situation requires from the planner efforts in the search for a solution to mitigate and improve these problems. In this sense, this research aims to identify and analyze the main factors that explain the performance of Cesbs, enabling the construction of a set of information about the provision of services of basic sanitation as a way to meet the planners of this important component of the population's quality of life. To this end, 36 indicators were selected from the 26 Cesbs for the year 2003, which cover operational, economic and financial aspects. Data were collected from the National Sanitation Information System (SNIS), published by the Ministry of Cities and subjected to statistical treatment of factor analysis. From the analyzed variables, it was possible to identify the operational management factors as the most representative and that best explained the performance of the sanitation companies: monitoring and control, water demand management, sewage service, urban structuring, environmental protection, disposal and mode of use of urban space, economic capacity, financial capacity, tariff policy, collection efficiency and liability quality.