Inequalities’ in coverage of basic services such as drinking water or rubbish collection ‘affect’ cities outside the Greater Metropolitan Area (GAM), a report by the Court of Auditors in Costa Rica states. Ciudad Quesada, Guápiles, Liberia, Limón, Pérez Zeledón, Puntarenas and Turrialba have ‘gaps’ in access to drinking water, refuse collection, electricity, mobility, sanitation and telecommunications, problems that the comptroller says ‘increase the vulnerability of the populations’ in their peripheries.
The study shows that between 26% and 82% of the sectors in these cities do not have access to drinking water. In Ciudad Quesada, for example, areas far from the city centre are affected, while in Guápiles, Liberia and Limón the availability of services decreases as one moves towards the periphery. Furthermore, in Turrialba, the lack of sufficient data made it impossible to carry out a full analysis of drinking water coverage, reflecting “planning and management problems”.
With regard to sanitation, four intermediate cities have less than 44% coverage, while in three of them the service is non-existent. Puntarenas and Pérez Zeledón are examples of areas where ‘basic infrastructure’ for this purpose is not registered, a situation that ‘aggravates environmental and sanitary risks’.
