Laila Smith

Former Collaborating Researcher

Laila Smith collaborated with UNRISD on the project Commercialization, Privatization and Universal Access to Water. At the time of her collaboration with UNRISD she was employed in the Contract Management Unit in the City of Johannesburg, the only municipal regulator in the country.
She has a PhD from Clark University in Massachusetts on the corporatization of water. As part of her research she examined the institutional transformation in the post-apartheid period in South Africa with regard to service delivery at the local level in general and in Cape Town in particular. Her interests are to ensure more transparency of information flows between service providers and service authorities, establish more rigorous accountability measures and try to develop policies to better protect the rights of low-income service users.