Senegal On-Site Sanitation Project
On July 6, 2007, the Government of Senegal and GPOBA signed a US$5.8 million grant to help deliver access to on-site sanitation facilities to the urban poor in Dakar. The grant is funded by the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development and the Netherlands’ Ministry of Development Cooperation. This project will provide affordable sanitation to over 15,000 poor households in targeted poor areas of Dakar through the installation of on-site sanitation facilities such as showers or wash basins with soak-away, or pour-flush latrines. Furthermore, the project will involve sanitation education as well as monitoring and verification. The subsidies provided through the GPOBA grant are disbursed to an implementing agency and the local private contractors/artisans on an output-basis. For more information please see http://www.gpoba.org/activities/details.asp?id=23 or contact Sylvie Debomy.

Decentralized Electricity for Universal Access in Bolivia
On July 24, 2007, Bolivia signed a US$5.2 million grant to help deliver access to renewable electricity to approximately 9,000 rural poor households. The GPOBA grant is funded by the International Finance Corporation and the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development. This project will provide affordable electricity to over 7,000 poor Bolivian households, micro-enterprises, schools and hospitals in remote and dispersed rural areas, through the installation of solar home systems. The project will also pilot the provision of small pico-PV systems for about 2,000 very poor households. Building on an existing World Bank-funded project, the Decentralized Infrastructure for Rural Transformation Project, GPOBA will provide subsidy funding, transaction support and capacity building. For more information, please see http://www.gpoba.org/activities/details.asp?id=44 or contact Susan Bogach.

Mozambique Water Private Sector Contracts – OBA for coverage expansion
The objective of the project is to provide subsidized water connections for low-income households in the cities of Maputo, Beira, Nampula, Quelimane, and Pemba in Mozambique. The World Bank financed National Water Development Project II (NWDP II) began implementation in 2000 and concentrated on considerable investments in improving the production capacity of water systems. Several donors and facilities, including the World Bank, the Africa Catalytic Growth Fund, the EIB and WaterAid will help develop secondary and tertiary networks in the five cities, and a GPOBA subsidy would enable the poorer households to afford connections to the network. The GPOBA grant will result in the construction of over 30,000 shared yard taps so that 36,300 households will gain access to piped water. For more information, please see http://www.gpoba.org/activities/details.asp?id=62 or contact Luiz Tavares.

Metro Manila Water Supply
This project will seek to provide affordable piped water to poor households within the East Zone administered by the Manila Water Company (MWC). Local Government agencies and the MWC estimate that almost all households within the project’s target communities would not be able to afford the connection fees, but could afford to pay for the required meter and guarantee deposits. GPOBA will, therefore, fully subsidize the connection fee for eligible households. It is expected that GPOBA grant funds would help bring new water services to approximately 20,000 poor households (benefiting approximately 120,000 people). For more information, please see http://www.gpoba.org/activities/details.asp?id=56 or contact Iain Menzies.

Cambodia Rural Telecommunication Access Project
The objective of the project is to bring telephone service to low income families in rural and remote areas in Cambodia. The project consists of two primary components which support the provision of mobile phone services as well as public phones in areas with no access to telephony. This project will bring access to some form of telephony to approximately 67,000 households. GPOBA has previously committed Technical Assistance funding to help design an output-based scheme to increase telecommunications access in Cambodia. For more information, please see http://www.gpoba.org/activities/details.asp?id=34 or contact Natasha Beschorner.

Yemen Safe Motherhood Program
The objective of the project is to provide sustainable maternal health services to help poor women of reproductive age (15-49) in Sana’a, Yemen. The project will implement a sustainable safe motherhood voucher program that will provide a ‘Mother-Baby package’ of essential services (including antenatal care including birth attendance by skilled professionals, postnatal and complicated care services) as defined by the WHO. The output from this project will be 40,800 safe child births attended by trained professionals. GPOBA is requested to finance the implementation of the pilot phase including the required service provider costs for the first year as well as finance the ongoing project and voucher costs for years 2-4. For more information, please see http://www.gpoba.org/activities/details.asp?id=61 or contact Carmen Nonay.

Pre-paid Health Scheme Project in Nigeria
The objective of this project is to increase access to quality basic health care in Nigeria. The project will utilize the structure established by the Health Insurance Fund (“HIF”) – a Dutch non-governmental organization – in poorer parts of Nigeria to expand the provision of pre-paid health services to additional groups of beneficiaries. This project aims at subsidizing over 24,000 insurance packages over 5 years. GPOBA funding will support widening access to quality healthcare in Nigeria for selected target groups through providing a subsidy for enrollment in the pre-paid health scheme and actual delivery of satisfactory health service. For more information, please see http://www.gpoba.org/activities/details.asp?id=58 or contact Carmen Nonay.

Reproductive Health Vouchers in Western Uganda
The aim of this project, which is co-funded by Germany's KfW, is to increase women’s access to trained medical professionals throughout pregnancy. It will also provide subsidized treatment of sexually transmitted diseases to poor Ugandans. The voucher scheme will target rural and poor peri urban populations living in the areas of approved providers in the greater Mbarara region in western Uganda benefiting up to 145,000 households. The project will fight maternal and infant mortality through provision of a package of services for safe child birth. This includes ante-natal and post-natal visits as well as birth attendance by trained professionals, and provision of caesarean section (where required). KfW will implement the project on GPOBA’s behalf. For more information, please see http://www.gpoba.org/activities/details.asp?id=60 or contact Lars Johannes.

Cameroon Water Affermage contract - OBA for coverage expansion
The objective of this project is to subsidize the cost of new connections for domestic customers, in order to facilitate access for low- to middle-income households without access to piped water benefiting approximately 50,000 low- to middle-income households. The project will have considerable catalytic impact and synergies with funding from the World Bank, AFD and EIB, by ensuring that investment in rehabilitation and capacity expansion of the systems does not only result in improved quality of service for the affluent population already connected, but also can fully translate into significant gains in low- and middle-income households. The project has been committed pending funding. For more information, please see http://www.gpoba.org/activities/details.asp?id=53 or contact Philippe Marin.

Vietnam Rural Water (EMW)
This project aims to entrust an NGO (East Meets West Foundation - EMWF) to pilot an output-based approach to provide safe drinking water to about 30,000 poor households in five provinces located in the central part of Vietnam. The project plans to develop 75 village-based and locally managed piped water schemes. GPOBA will help EMWF and its local subsidiary “Reach Vietnam” leverage the achievements of their experience of bringing safe water to beneficiary communities by testing the potential for replication of the model with an OBA approach, possibly involving private sector involvement for management of schemes. For more information, please see http://www.gpoba.org/activities/details.asp?id=64 or contact Xavier Chauvot de Beauchene.

Kampala – Water Connections for the Poor
This OBA scheme aims to provide water services to poor households previously not served in slum and peri urban areas of Kampala, Uganda. The OBA scheme will provide one-off connection subsidies to partially fund the cost of new metered connections to be made by the National Water and Sewerage Corporation (NWSC), Uganda's public water utility . The project envisages making about 19,000 new yard tap connections and about 800 new public water points over a period of three years benefiting approximately 40,000 households. GPOBA is currently funding Technical Assistance activities to help design an OBA scheme and will provide subsidies to help cover some of the cost of connections as well as the costs for an independent monitoring agent. For more information, please see http://www.gpoba.org/activities/details.asp?id=63 or contact Yogita Mumssen.

*Projects receiving GPOBA commitment have been approved for subsidy funding pending conditions precedent being met.

GPOBA Publications

GPOBA Annual Report 2007
This report covers the year between July 1, 2006 and June 30, 2007. GPOBA’s first annual report gives an overview of OBA during this time period, including lessons and challenges, and reports on GPOBA’s project portfolio which focuses on water, sanitation, energy, telecommunications, transport, health, and education sectors.

Established in January 2003 by DFID and the World Bank, GPOBA’s purpose is to fund, demonstrate, and document OBA approaches to support the delivery of basic services to those least able to afford them and to those without access to such services. GPOBA’s current donors include DFID, World Bank, IFC, DGIS and AusAid.

Read more: http://www.gpoba.org/docs/gpoba_ar_2007.pdf

Output-Based Aid in Infrastructure: A Tool for Reducing the Impact of Corruption
Corruption in infrastructure leads to big losses. Estimates of the share of construction spending lost to bribe payments around the world range from 5 percent to more than 20 percent. 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 goals.

Read more: http://www.gpoba.org/docs/OBApproaches16_CorruptionOBA.pdf

Read other GPOBA Publications here: http://www.gpoba.org/publications/index.asp

GPOBA Workshops:

Workshop – Designing and Implementing an Output-Based Aid (OBA) Project in the Bank
A workshop was held on June 21, 2007 for World Bank staff where they explored in detail and in practice some of the key challenges in designing and implementing OBA schemes within Bank projects. Speakers included: Patricia de Baquero (OPCPR), Fabiola Altimari Montiel (LEGLA), Wolfgang Chadab (LOAG2), Atul Bhalchandra Deshpande (SARFM) and Dana Rysankova (AFTEG).