Investing in small-town America: Lessons from international development amid Greenville’s quest for clean water

Rural communities across the United States often struggle to access federal funding for critical infrastructure, especially when they lack the administrative capacity to navigate complex grant processes. Greenville, Mississippi—a city of about 30,000 in the Mississippi Delta, where roughly 80% of residents are Black—illustrates the challenge of lifting citizens out of poverty and achieving the internationally agreed standards of living set out in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Improving water and sanitation services (WASH) has become Greenville’s top development priority. Although the United States has achieved 98% coverage under SDG 6.2 (clean water and sanitation), that remaining 2% translates into 6.6 million people—about the population of Indiana—still lacking proper access. Substantial funding was made available through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (2021) and the Inflation Reduction Act (2022), yet small municipalities struggled to effectively access these resources.

In October 2023, Mayor Errick Simmons invited us—recent retirees of the World Bank and the U.N.—to visit Greenville, Mississippi to help that rural town access much-needed investment from federal programs. Offering to work as pro bono grant writers, we were keen to bring our international development experience closer to home.

Greenville’s priorities and financial challenges

In conversations with city officials, it became clear that rehabilitating the long-neglected Wastewater Treatment Plant, which required $14 million in grant finance, was the top priority. Decades of underinvestment had left the facility particularly vulnerable to climate-related flooding, and it had been cited for violating the Clean Water Act, even dumping raw and untreated sewage into the Mississippi River.

Work to upgrade the plant had been ongoing since 2016 and although the city had acquired a loan from the state’s Water Pollution Control State Revolving Fund (WPCSRF), the City of Greenville could no longer afford further debt without jeopardizing the city’s operational and wage budget. With nearly one in three households below the poverty line, increasing utility rates to finance the investment was also not an option.

An impenetrable and problematic federal grant landscape

Navigating federal grant programs proved equally daunting.

Many funding windows required matching contributions that Greenville lacked, or demanded the city pay costs up front before reimbursement. Even the Rural Partners Network, created during the Biden administration to assist communities like Greenville, found it challenging to locate viable grant options. Within the Environmental Protection Agency’s State and Tribal Assistance Grants alone, more than 50 discrete lines existed, each with its own rules, population limits, or insufficient funding levels.

In the end, Greenville secured $13.2 million in 2024 to complete the work on the Wastewater Treatment Plant through a one-time earmark in federal appropriations in response to a special Congressionally Directed Spending Request as a result of the work of a dedicated mayor and two committed Congresspeople.

Having Congressional members putting forward a request for every town is not a replicable or sustainable way to finance the investment needs of America’s rural places. It took us took us seven days of full-time work to make a small amount of progress—an effort that would be a substantial investment of time for overstretched and under-resourced local officials with many competing priorities, and didn’t even result in a completed application.

Comparisons with the international development landscape

Our experience uncovered the systematic gaps in U.S. domestic funding compared to international development frameworks. Individual federal departments have their own criteria and requirements. Just identifying infrastructure grant windows for which Greenville would be eligible was a monumental effort. Ultimately, we could find no US federal grant windows to answer Greenville’s needs.

Federal grant mechanisms are narrowly defined for a very specific purpose, yet the presumption of technical expertise and sophistication makes project development a huge challenge for a majority-minority jurisdiction like Greenville. And that’s just for one issue and need—for a place that has multiple needs at once, with a tax base and current level of debt distress.

In Greenville, WASH investment was at the top of the city’s priorities, but it is only one component in an array of investments that the city would like to pursue. Greenville’s poverty rate is 32%, and it has a higher-education attainment rate of only 20%, among other challenges. The difficulty in getting investment for only one of the city’s urgent sustainable development priorities illustrates how big the hurdles are for capacity-constrained municipalities like Greenville.

Our experience may go some way to understanding why the United States finds it hard to make the final miles in achieving the SDGs. The most recent assessment of the United States’ progress toward meeting the SDGs shows the U.S. far behind most of the other high-income countries, with stark divisions by class, race and geography. Mississippi lags behind all other states on the leave no-one behind agenda, which requires prioritizing the needs of the most marginalized, discriminated against, impoverished and vulnerable communities.

We were struck by the contrast with the international system for investment in infrastructure and other SDG-related areas for low-income countries. This system includes multilateral development banks, most notably the World Bank, which provide loans at concessional rates as well as grants across an array of sectors, including infrastructure, agriculture, health and education, to name a few. In the poorest countries sectoral investments in infrastructure projects are often complemented by general budget support, which can be used by government departments for ongoing maintenance, helping lift financing constraints faced by cash-strapped governments and so achieve better service delivery over the medium to long term.

Beyond the multilateral development banks, there is an ecosystem of government and non-government organizations that provide finance as well as technical and implementation support. There are also the specialized funds and programs of the United Nations, and philanthropic funds. Perhaps equally important as finance, the international development system is geared toward long-term partnership with local and national governments, to provide expertise and technical advice as needed, not only for program implementation but in areas such as environmental impact, poverty reduction, gender equality and climate change.

The U.S. has done much to build the international system for achieving the SDGs. The U.S. has traditionally been the world’s largest bilateral donor, and its funding mechanisms, INGOs, and federal aid agencies, usually working closely with the private sector, are among the most innovative and influential when it comes to working to meet SDGs internationally. But this compares poorly to what is happening on the domestic front.

The U.S., however, lacks a coherent federal policy or a shared policy perspective on how a diverse array of rural areas, populations, and economies can thrive in the 21st century. There is an urgent need for a more coherent domestic policy system that fits the reality of distressed rural cities and towns in America like Greenville and meets local government where they are, with flexible financing and robust technical support. These reforms have already been mapped out and proposed. Now they need serious consideration. The municipal leaders of Greenville are working to reverse decades of being “left behind.” They should not have to do it alone.