This paper presents a review of studies that estimate the cost of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Although the Sustainable Development Goals provide useful benchmarks for fiscal authorities and donors, typical cross-country costing exercises can be misleading, for a variety of...

This paper outlines changes that have been made in the 2019 version of the Health Equity and Financial Protection Indicators database. On the financial protection side, the changes include an increase in the number of indicators from five to 14; revisions to several previous data points,...

The Sustainable Development Goals recently adopted by the United Nations represent an important step to identify shared global goals for development over the next two decades. Yet, the stated goals are not as straightforward and easy to interpret as they appear on the surface. Review of the...

This paper explores the investments needed to achieve universal access to electricity in Sub-Saharan Africa by 2030, and the additional operation and maintenance costs these investments entail. It also explores the drivers of these costs, by exploring hundreds of scenarios that combine...

This paper provides an overview of research on out-of-pocket health expenditures, reviewing the various summary measures and the results of multi-country studies using these measures. The paper presents estimates for 146 countries from all World Bank income groups for all summary measures, along...

The United Nations 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals are comprehensive and holistic in nature, as they includes 17 goals and 169 targets covering economic, social, and environmental dimensions of development. In this context, policy makers face the challenge of translating the...

This policy note draws upon information collated during a diagnostic study on the state of household and institutional sanitation in rural and urban areas, and presents the barriers and drivers of improvement of sanitation in the country. Low median household incomes, which constrain investment...

The government of Uganda has given strong emphasis to eradicating open defecation and to encouraging people to invest in safe containment systems. Funding to local governments is spurring sanitation improvement on a significant scale. But as the pace of urbanization picks up in the country and...

The objective of this report is to better understand the challenges of meeting Sustainable Development Goal 6.1 from the perspective of off-grid services currently being used by a large and increasing proportion of the urban population. For this assessment, two key distinct areas with high...

Today about 676 million urban residents, many of them poor, do not have access to the Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) definition of "safely managed" water supplies. They receive an off-grid water supply service that is not safely managed, accessible, or affordable, and thus not compliant with...