Success story: Public-Private Partnership is the Key to Improved City Cleanliness in Gramsh.
Citizens and business partners work with the Gramsh Municipality to keep their community safe, clean, and beautiful.
A key aim of LGPA’s work is to help municipalities improve public services and engage local citizens and community stakeholders to work with the Municipality in this effort. In Gramsh, LGPA has targeted improvements to the cleaning service (waste collection/disposal).

For years, the City of Gramsh has struggled to keep the city clean, but a combination of problems has impeded the City’s efforts – until now. The Municipality decided that the myriad problems, including a lack of solid waste dumpsters and trash cans, poor quality of cleaning service due to lack of funds, and poor discipline on the part of citizens in disposing of their waste demanded a creative and comprehensive overhaul of the City’s approach to keeping the City clean.
In order to make the reforms in service provision sustainable, the City decided to engage citizens and private businesses more closely in developing the improvement plan. With the support of USAID’s Local Governance Program in Albania (LGPA), the City conducted a thorough financial and operational review of the Municipal Cleaning Organization. Based on the assessment, a full-cost recovery tariff was calculated, including the needed capital investment to keep the City clean.
To ensure buy-in from the Community on the proposed increase in tariff, a Community Committee was convened to review the assessments and to vote on various options which balanced tariff increases with an improvements in service. The Community Committee voted to increase the tariff by as much as 50%, and a municipal council decision ultimately led to an increase of 25%.