In Armenia, a country with severe winters, many low-income households cannot afford the cost of connecting to gas networks or heating equipment. To help families benefit from clean and efficient gas-based heating, GPOBA and the World Bank funded a scheme that provided grants to eligible poor households for individual or local heating solutions. Disbursement of the funds was tied to the delivery of pre-agreed outputs, creating incentives for the service providers to ensure timely completion of the installation work and early delivery of the gas or heat supply. 

Despite having one of the most developed water service and delivery in Sub-Saharan Africa, Senegal’s sanitation sector is not as developed. The government’s urban sanitation strategy calls for the development of on-site solutions at municipal level, based on the approach of the Programme d’Assainissement Autonome des Quartiers Peri-urbains de Dakar (PAQPUD). The predecessor of the OBA project, PAQPUD was a large result-oriented, pro-poor program that provided 63,000 facilities, as well as small-bore sewers, increasing sanitation coverage by 22 percent in the target areas in four years. PAQPUD ended in 2005 for lack of funds, leaving demand for 74,000 demands unmet. In 2007 GPOBA provided funding to build on-site facilities in five municipalities originally targeted by PAQPUD. By December 2011, when the project closed, more than 103,000 people had benefited from an improved sanitation facility at home. 

In Jakarta Indonesia, many of the urban poor live in illegal or informal slum communities where access to individual or group piped connections is not permitted. As a result, poor households have had to rely on very expensive supply from informal water vendors or the use of polluted groundwater. In 2007, GPOBA provided support to pilot OBA approach to improve access to piped water supply in poor communities, including informal or slum communities. The project provided access to safe and affordable piped water services to low-income households in six legal and illegal/informal communities in western Jakarta. Over 5,000 households have been connected to the network and the second phase of the project exclusively focused on informal or slum communities.

In Mongolia, access to telecommunications services has been extremely limited, especially in the remote and sparsely populated areas. Some of the challenges include the rugged geography and the nomadic lifestyle of the rural population as well as government ownership and incumbent control of the long-distance transmission network. To tackle these challenges, GPOBA support was used to provide subsidies for the expansion of ICT services into rural areas and to manage and finance several “least-cost” subsidy competitions. The recipients of subsidies were private operators that are responsible for installing and operating the rural voice and Internet services. This approach managed to harness the power of the private sector by providing incentives to deliver services in rural areas to low-income communities.

In Uganda there are 160 small towns and about 850 rural growth centers, with a total estimated population of 2.5 million. In 2008 safe water coverage extended to about 46 percent of the population in the 160 small towns, and systems functioned 89 percent of the time on average. The government’s goal was to achieve 65 percent coverage and 95 percent functionality by 2015, and full coverage by 2035. To support the government of Uganda with this vision, GPOBA supported an OBA pilot project in small towns and rural growth centers to test a risk transfer mechanism that leverages private sector finance and expertise in system design, construction, and operation within the existing institutional framework. The project provided affordable safe water to new customers among poorer groups while promoting effective implementation, value for money, and private participation.

Since the 1990s, Colombia has made significant strides to allow access to natural gas connections for poor households. Natural gas is the least polluting among the traditional fuels used for cooking and heating, is far cheaper, and much safer. GPOBA’s Access to Natural Gas project encouraged poor communities in the costal areas of Columbia to use natural gas by providing a partial subsidy to reduce the burden of paying for the new gas connection. 

In Morocco, despite the availability of good infrastructure for the delivery of water and sanitation services, over 1 million residents still lack access in the fast-growing outskirts of cities and urban areas. In 2015, the government came up with a directive to improve the provision of water and sanitation services to low-income communities and informal settlements in urban areas. This initiative set in motion a collaboration between private operators in the country, local municipalities, and GPOBA.The GPOBA support provided funding for a pilot OBA scheme to expand services in poor peri-urban areas to bridge the financial gap between households’ ability to pay for connections and the cost of service. The project helped over 62,000 residents receive improved access to sanitation and piped water supply services.

In the eastern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, it is estimated that between 9 and 17 million people are exposed to water with high pathogen levels, which leads water borne disease and deaths due to diarrhea. The Andhra Pradesh Rural Community Water project piloted an output-based approach to provide safe drinking water to 10,000 families through an innovative village based public-private partnership model. The project included the construction, installation, and operation of community supply water schemes and incorporated campaigns to promote awareness of safe drinking water practices. 

GPOBA supported efforts to expand access to telecommunications infrastructure and services in rural Indonesia. Working in partnership with the Government of Indonesia and the World Bank, the pilot project redesigned the national universal service program into a public-private partnership approach. GPOBA funding was used to design, implement, and evaluate a program targeting villages that are poor and disadvantaged due to a variety of geographical and socioeconomic factors. 

In late 2006, Nepal was recovering from a decade long conflict and was one of the poorest countries in the world. About 82 percent of its population of around 26 million lived in rural areas and depended almost exclusively on agriculture. Rural households, which accounted for about 90% of total energy use in Nepal, lacked access to modern energy sources and used biomass (a mixture of wood, dung, and agricultural residue) for cooking and heating.  GPOBA to promote biogas plants in rural areas and enhance the sustainability of the energy sector provided funding to help increase the number of households sustainably using biogas plants under the government’s existing Biogas Support Program. The project resulted in the installation of 27,139 biogas plants in low-income households, including more than 16,000 disadvantaged families.