Water management contracts and leases, and the national lease from 2017
Armenia ran a sequence of water public-private partnerships from 2000, a Yerevan management contract, a 2006 to 2016 Yerevan lease and management contracts for the national and three regional utilities, which raised daily supply from about 6 hours in 1998 to 24 hours in most of Yerevan by 2015, and from January 2017 consolidated them into a single 15-year national lease covering about 2.2 million people.
2,200,000 people (about two-thirds of the population), people in the area covered by the 15-year national water lease from january 2017, 2017. 6 hours per day (24 in most of Yerevan by 2015), average daily water supply in most parts of the country, including yerevan, before the ppps, 1998. World Bank and PPIAF, Review of Armenia's Experience with Water Public-Private Partnerships (Marin, Muzenda and Andreasyan), 2017, retrieved 2026-10-02.
The move, and what it needed
The government contracted private operators in stages, first to manage the Yerevan utility for a fee with performance incentives, then to lease it, then to manage the national and regional utilities, and finally to lease all of them as one national concession paying a lease fee to the state, while the state kept financing capital works.
Preconditions
- Donor and state finance for network rehabilitation, which the operators did not provide
- Government willingness to raise tariffs in steps matched to visible service gains
- Successive contracts long enough to build a local record that justified the next, larger one
Limits: All figures are in the executive summary of a PDF (printed pages ix to xi). The review was written by World Bank staff with support from PPIAF, a facility that promotes infrastructure PPPs, and credits the operators generously, and the 24-hour figure is 'most of Yerevan', not the country. The same review says non-revenue water barely improved, that tariffs outside Yerevan stayed below cost recovery when the management contracts ended in 2016, and that capital investment was financed by the government, so the private operators ran networks without financing them. The record's newest verified fact is the start of the national lease in January 2017; we did not find an official account of its performance since then at an open URL, so 'operating' rests on its 15-year term, and any later dispute, renegotiation or early termination is not covered. The national lease introduced a single national tariff, a cross-subsidy from Yerevan to the rest of the country, whose effect on supply hours outside Yerevan is not shown here.