Increasing access to basic infrastructure services is critical to reducing poverty and enabling poor and marginalized people to participate in and benefit from economic development. Too often, however, the gap between the cost of the initial service connection and a user’s ability to pay for...

Electrification can be a significant driver for improving livelihoods in rural communities. In rural Mali, where more than 80 percent of the country’s population lives, the electrification rate is only 15 percent. Increasing access to electricity in rural Mali is crucial for economic...

Against the backdrop of rapidly rising urbanization in the developing world and the growing demand for basic services such as water and power, there is an increasing need to improve service delivery, particularly in low-income urban settlements. Output-based aid (OBA) approaches, with their...

A renewable energy program in Bangladesh that brings solar power to rural households is one of the most successful solar home system (SHS) programs in the world. It has demonstrated an inexpensive and reliable way to bring electricity to rural households. Several output-based aid (OBA) features...

With pressure for greater accountability and value for money in public budgets, widening the use of results-based financing (RBF) and setting up adequate independent mechanisms to verify results is becoming increasingly important. In January 2012, the World Bank launched the Program-for-Results...

In Vietnam, achieving sustainable provision of water services for communities in rural areas has been a challenge for years. About 74 percent of the Vietnamese population is concentrated in rural areas, yet just 48 percent of households have access to clean water, compared with 82 percent in...

In 2010 the World Bank approved a US$220 million loan for a Local Government and Decentralization project in Indonesia. The project aims to improve the accountability and reporting of the central government's Specific Purpose Grants (DAK). Piloted in four infrastructure sub-sectors-irrigation,...

Output-Based Aid (OBA) ties the disbursement of public funding to the achievement of clearly specified results that directly support improved access to basic services. OBA has emerged as an important way to finance access to basic services, but experience with OBA approaches in the sanitation...

Worldwide, nearly 1.4 billion people live without access to electricity and nearly 2.7 billion people use traditional biomass fuels for cooking. One challenge to increasing reliable energy access for the poor is their limited ability to pay the up-front connection fees for electricity and...

Output-Based Aid (OBA) has been used since the early 2000s to deliver basic infrastructure and social services to the poor, typically through public-private partnerships. Given the limited experience with OBA in the water and sanitation sector, Global Partnership OBA has made a concerted effort...