Washington, D.C., October 19, 2007—The International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank Group, is contributing to a new Manila Water Company (MWC) Inc. project through the Global Partnership on Output Based Aid, a multidonor trust fund administered by the World Bank. GPOBA today signed an agreement with the company to cofinance individual household water supply connections in poor communities in the Philippine capital. About 20,000 homes will benefit from the $1.05 million grant.

This new project builds on IFC’s partnership with Manila Water since 1997, when, following an IFC-structured deal, the company was awarded a 25-year concession to provide services to 5.3 million people in the city’s eastern zone. The GPOBA grant will support Manila Water’s flagship program, “Tubig Para sa Barangay” (water for the community), which was launched in 1998. Since then, more than a million poor people in urban areas have received a regular supply of clean, safe, and affordable drinking water.

The new project, will build on the program’s successful track record, accelerating the rollout of individual connections to poor households. The project plans to reduce the cost of household connections by subsidizing the regulated connection fee through a $17.6 million project. The GPOBA subsidy will support the water service connection component of Manila Water’s flagship program. It is part of a larger network expansion program. The company will also install booster pumps, reservoirs, infiltration galleries, and secondary or tertiary distribution pipelines in target communities.

Manila Water’s standard household connection covers the pipe work to the meter and the meter itself. To improve the GPOBA scheme’s sustainability, the company will prefinance “after the meter” pipe work and faucets. Each household will repay Manila Water in monthly installments for these facilities.
 
In addition to the GPOBA program, “Manila Water will also offer to prefund the provision of a toilet, as this is seen to be essential to making a complete and sustainable development package available to poor communities,” said Manila Water’s President Tony Aquino.

The program is structured around installing a working household connection that must deliver acceptable service for three months. “To ensure the sustainability of the scheme over and above the subsidized connection fee, customers will be billed according to the actual work done, and costs will reflect in their water bill,” added Patricia Veevers-Carter, GPOBA Program Manager.

To finance its part of the project, GPOBA will be drawing on contributions from IFC. Rashad Kaldany, IFC Director for Infrastructure, said, “We are happy to support Manila Water in developing a scheme that is innovative in its design and use of subsidies, and that increases the sustainability of the concession.”

Full Press Release

Project Summary

Photo: Arne Hoel / World Bank

Output-based Aid (OBA) is a results-based approach that is being used to help poor people in developing countries gain access to basic services, including safe water. In the Philippines, GPOBA is providing US$225,000 in technical assistance to help create a National OBA Facility  that will manage the provision of affordable and safe water to poor households.

• Over 900 million people do not have access to fresh water and have to see access on a daily basis;
• About  2.5 billion people, in urban and rural areas globally, run the risk of chronic disease as a direct result of lack of access to safe sanitation; and
• Each year 1.8 million people die from water-related causes including sickness, floods and famine.

In 2007, the Global Partnership on Output-Based Aid (GPOBA) facility, a multi-donor trust fund administered by the World Bank provided Manila Water a grant of $2.8 million to expand its “Tubig Para sa Barangay” (TPSB) or Water for the Poor program in 45 urban poor communities. 

Today, these communities enjoy clean potable water 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The children are clean and healthy, with the danger of water-borne diseases reduced drastically.

Read the feature story

A look at how output-based aid (OBA) is being used to help the urban poor access water services

• Until recent projects funded by the municipal council and the World Bank made clean water available and affordable (Ksh3 per 20 liters), Kibera’s population relied on water collected from the Nairobi dam.  The water from the dam is not clean and made the dwellers vulnerable to contracting cholera or typhoid; and   
•  Most dwellings in Kibera do not have toilet facilities, relying instead on latrines which are just holes in the ground and each one shared by up to 50 shacks.

• In Cameroon, only about a third of the national population has access to piped water. A GPOBA pilot with a grant of over US$5 million aims to deliver new piped water connections for about 40,000 poor households. The project is the first GPOBA project to use an affermage contract, a model which transfers the operation of a national utility to a private operator while investment remains the government’s responsibility.  

• In Indonesia, two projects with grants totaling about US$ 5 million aim to help low-income communities in Jakarta and Surabaya gain access to clean water. In Jakarta, unconnected households can pay as much as 15 percent of their household income on water. Often, the water that they do have access to is overpriced by informal providers or is collected from shallow wells and contaminated. In Surabaya, the pilot project aims to extend piped water access to over 77,000 people.

• Although Morocco is a middle-income country with good access to clean and affordable water for most of the population, there are some poor communities in peri-urban settlements that faced the “last mile” paradox. So, although the water infrastructure was there, the cost of connecting to the network presented a barrier to access for poor households. In partnership with the government and the operators of water utilities in Casablanca, Meknès, and Tangiers, a GPOBA grant of US$7 million is helping over 11,000 households connect to local water networks.

• In the Philippines, the Manila Water Supply pilot will help almost 100,000 people gain access to clean, potable water. So far, 45 projects have been completed and benefited 11,000 households. As well as enjoying the benefit of 24-hour access to clean water supply, the target households have also reported financial savings and a reduction in the incidence of water-borne diseases. Encouraged by the initial success of the Manila project, the Government of the Philippines is exploring the idea of a national OBA facility to help ensure access to water for people across the country.

•  In Uganda’s capital city, Kampala, water connections for the poor will help bring access for communities in targeted urban settlements up to almost 100 percent by the project’s end.

•  In Yemen, a GPOBA grant of US$5 million will help the poor in urban and peri-urban areas gain access to safe drinking water and sanitation services. The pilot project is also being used as a model to show that tapping into private sector expertise and encouraging competition in the water sector can both serve the poor and help to reduce infrastructure costs.

News Release No 2012/02

Contacts

In Washington:
Roger Morier, tel. (+1) 202 473 5675
rmorier@worldbank.org

In Manila:
David Llorito, tel. (+632) 917 3047
dllorito@worldbank.org

Manila, April 10, 2012 – The World Bank, acting as administrator for the Global Partnership on Output-Based Aid (GPOBA), has approved a grant of US$3.6 million to increase access to affordable reproductive health services for low-income families living in the provinces of Leyte, Southern Leyte, Samar, Northern Samar and Eastern Samar in the Eastern Visayas region.

Manila, August 23, 2016 - More than 40,000* poor families without electricity in remote areas of the country will soon have access to solar energy under the Access to Sustainable Energy Project grant agreement signed by the LGU Guarantee Corporation (LGUGC) and the World Bank.

The access of households to solar energy is supported with $3 million from the Global Partnership on Output-Based Aid (GPOBA), $12.8 million from the European Union and an additional contribution from the Department of Energy of the Philippines.

“This project supports affordable, clean energy in the Philippines for those who have no access to the grid,” said Catherine Commander O’Farrell, Head of GPOBA. “GPOBA has had a long engagement in the Philippines, working to mainstream results-based financing in the World Bank’s operations to ensure that basic services are extended to poor households. We are very pleased that this deep engagement in the country is also reflected in this innovative results-focused energy project.”

This project targets remote areas and isolated islands whose marginalization is increased by a lack of electricity. A particular focus of the project is conflict-affected Mindanao, where poverty is disproportionately high and over a quarter of the population lives without electricity.

The project will be implemented by the private LGU Guarantee Corporation, in partnership with Electric Cooperatives. LGUGC, in coordination with other stakeholders, will organize competitive bidding to select private contractors to supply and install the solar home systems (SHS). GPOBA will disburse output-based subsidies to contractors upon verification that SHSs have been installed and are functioning.

“We are working with the IFC-World Bank Lighting Global Initiative to provide quality service under Access to Sustainable Energy Project,” said Mara K. Warwick, World Bank Country Director for the Philippines. “The certified solar packages will ensure not only lighting, but will also provide households with energy efficient appliance packages including televisions, radios, phone chargers, and fans.”

The project builds on long-term advisory work undertaken by the World Bank and GPOBA for the government of the Philippines. This includes support in setting up the policy and regulatory framework for establishing an Output-Based Aid (OBA) Solar Energy Facility to provide output-based subsidies that make energy affordable for poor households. Part of the new grant from GPOBA will be allocated for advisory support for organizing transactions for both GPOBA’s subsidy funding and European Union funding.

The World Bank has incorporated in the design of ASEP lessons learned on the sustainability of solar business models from a previously funded project in the Philippines, the Rural Power Project, as well as experience gained from implementing successful OBA projects in renewable energy in other parts of the world. GPOBA is proud to support the government’s vision of making access to off-grid electrification affordable to the poor in unserved areas of the Philippines using this results-based approach.

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GPOBA, a global partnership program founded in 2003 and administered by the World Bank, is a multi-donor trust fund used to develop output and results-based aid approaches to provide basic services in infrastructure, health and education. It has a portfolio of 46 OBA pilot projects with US$234 million in commitments, serving approximately nine million people in marginalized communities.

* This stems from GPOBA and EU assistance combined.