The national enterprise, the Empresa de Servicios Sanitarios de Paraguay (ESSAP), is responsible for serving communities with populations of more than 10,000 inhabitants. In rural communities and small towns with less than 10,000 inhabitants water associations provide services, while technical assistance and financing are provided by the National Environmental Sanitation Service (SENASA). The Juntas are grouped in 10 associations which supply water to more than half of country's population The first Juntas were created with the assistance of the World Bank's first rural water and sanitation loan to Paraguay in 1977, fostering a successful long-term partnership that endures until today. An interesting phenomenon in Paraguay is the emergence of independent private suppliers, called “aguateros”, since the 1970s. Their efforts account for a significant share of the expansion of urban water coverage in the area of the capital. Aguateros are private, informal service providers who operate small-scale systems with up to 3,000 connections. An estimated 500 private suppliers serve some total of about 500,000 people. Urban utility tariffs are set below cost recovery levels and are adjusted infrequently, leading to substantial operating losses by the national water and sanitation enterprise. This makes it impossible to finance the investments necessary to further expand coverage and to improve  service quality. Tariffs by Aguateros fully recover costs and compare favorably with tariffs charged by the public sector. These tariffs are not regulated, but to some extent controlled by competition between aguateros serving neighboring areas. Unlike in many other countries, local Juntas are well organized and do not only recover operating and maintenance costs, but also expand their systems using their own resources and repay a portion of capital costs to the national treasury. According to data collected by the Pan-American Health Organization based on multi-purpose household surveys, the share of water expenditures in household expenditures in urban areas of Paraguay was the lowest among 10 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean in the late 1990s. The share was on average 1.4% and 1.7% for urban households in the poorest income decile, showing an unusually low difference between the average and poor households. These shares are actually the same or even higher in rural areas, reflecting the unusual high levels of cost recovery in rural areas in Paraguay. Rural households spend on average 1.2% on water, and households in the poorest decile in rural areas spend 2.3% on water. Therefore, despite high levels of cost recovery, tariffs apparently remain affordable.