Under the proposed project, IFC will provide strategic advisory support to the Ministry of Water to scale-up a program of PPP transactions for the provision of sustainable small potable water access schemes in rural towns delivered through concessions. In Benin, only 1.6 million people (28 percent of the rural and semi-urban population) currently have access to water through piped water systems (PWSs). In 2006, the government of Benin launched reforms in the rural water sector that transferred the management of 46 percent of the existing PWSs from local communities to private operators under public-private partnership (PPP) contracts to improve operational accountability and quality of service. The government wants to build upon this success and to address several challenges subsequently identified, including: high-levels of non-revenue water issues, the need for an improved risk allocation, and measures to mitigate private operators’ potential inability to raise funding. This IFC advisory project will address these issues by scaling-up the approach developed by IFC and the World Bank’s 2014 Water and Sanitation Program (WSP), which developed four rural water concessions as part of a pilot initiative to increase the introduction of PPPs in the sub-sector. Through this project, IFC will provide strategic support to the Ministry of Water as it implements PPPs on 60 PWSs. The project will be developed under a World Bank lending project. To ensure the sustainability of the model, and to guarantee its roll-out across the country, an international consulting firm will train and supervise six local firms/advisors that will execute the transactions with the municipalities, with each transaction representing a cluster of five PWSs.