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...

In Uganda small private companies have been operating water supply systems since 2001. A pilot output-based aid (OBA) project is expanding this approach. The project is leveraging private sector finance and expertise to provide access to piped water for an estimated 45,000 people in small towns...

Development practitioners are acutely aware of the need to find more effective ways to improve basic living conditions for the poor, as traditional approaches of delivering public support have not always led to the results intended. Output-Based Aid (OBA) is a results-based instrument that is...

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...

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...

Despite Chad's recent debut as an oil exporter, its people rank among the world's poorest. Large parts of the country are left in extreme isolation by the lack of a backbone road network that is passable year-round. To tackle the poor internal integration, the government formulated the National...

After decades of war and social disruption in Cambodia, publicly run water, and sanitation services are scarce, and limited mainly to urban areas. While private providers offer relatively good service, their high one-time connection charges put that service out of reach for all, but the more...

Using data from 270 water and sanitation providers, this Note investigates the relationship between a utility's size and its operating costs. The current trend toward transferring responsibility for providing services to the municipal level is driven in part by the assumption that this will make...

This note highlights the wide variation in performance on key indicators: unaccounted-for water, labor costs, the working ratio, service coverage, water prices and connection costs, and continuity of service. As governments struggle with rising health care costs, public-private partnerships in...

In some countries regulators routinely publish indicators of utility service performance through the local media. Exposing the "worst in class" has proven to be a powerful way of pressuring utilities to provide better services to consumers. This Note reviews the requirements for effective...