Morocco is a middle-income country with good water infrastructure that provides access to safe drinking water and sanitation to the majority of the urban population. In 2005, Morocco made it a priority to extend service to poor peri-urban settlements, and encouraged operators and local...

During the 1990s many Latin American countries developed universal access programs, financed through universal service funds, to increase telecommunications access in rural and low-income areas. The mechanism most often used to allocate the funds was the minimum subsidy tender, with subsidy...

Gas-based heating offers a clean, efficient, low-cost heating solution for poor urban households in Armenia, a country with severe winters. But many low-income households cannot afford the cost of connecting to gas networks and heating facilities or the cost of heating equipment. To help these...

Providing safe drinking water to poor families in the coastal area of Andhra Pradesh is critical for the economic development of the region as well as to improve health and living conditions. A community water project supported by the Global Partnership on Output-Based Aid (GPOBA) is increasing...

Output-based aid (OBA), or performance-based grants, can be used to help target services to the poor. Under OBA schemes, service providers are compensated only after delivery of a specified output, such as water connections of a specified quality, to a targeted beneficiary. In most cases that...

A project in the Mexican state of Guanajuato shows how tying disbursements to specific outputs can provide incentives for effective implementation of a water sector strategy. The disbursements, from pooled government and World Bank loan funds, are made against connections to safe and reliable...

Performance-based contracting in health is an example of a results-based financing approach to improving health service delivery. In 2003 and 2004 the Global Partnership on Output-Based Aid (GPOBA) supported the design of three schemes using performance-based contracting in Uganda, the...

Access to telecommunications services has been extremely limited in the remote and sparsely populated areas of Mongolia. Several factors have conspired against achieving universal access on a purely commercial basis the country's vast and challenging geography, the nomadic lifestyle of the rural...

Natural gas connections could bring substantial benefits to poor households in Colombia.compared with other fuels typically used for cooking, natural gas is safer, less expensive, and less environmentally damaging. But even though gas is more affordable, connection fees can put the cost of...

This note stress that it is important to reduce the financial cost of corruption by limiting bribe payments. But even more important is to ensure that corruption does not reduce the quantity and quality of infrastructure provision. Output-based aid (OBA) is a tool that can help achieve these...