Lessons Learned in Infrastructure Services Provision: Reaching the Poor

A key measure of the effectiveness of public spending on infrastructure is the extent to which it benefits poor people. In recent years policymakers and development practitioners have increasingly sought to understand why earlier approaches to infrastructure development often bypassed the poor or proved unsustainable. That work has led to revisions in policies, programs, and processes within the World Bank Group and in the countries it serves, aimed at doing more to extend the reach of infrastructure services to poor households and small enterprises.