Germany’s Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW) approached GPOBA to help expand its existing health voucher scheme in Uganda. KfW successfully launched a pilot project in July 2006, which finances the diagnosis and treatment of Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs). In addition, the current project will fight maternal mortality through provision of vouchers 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). 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. KfW will implement the project on GPOBA’s behalf.

The principle objective of the project is to improve energy services in Bangladesh through increasing access to electricity among the poor. In the broader economic goal of reducing poverty, by deepening the involvement of the community based stakeholders, the project broadens the range of electrification options, thereby creating alternatives to state-led provision of electricity services.

Less than half of Bangladesh’s population has access to grid electricity and in rural areas, where most of the population lives, the percentage is even lower. The Rural Electrification and Renewable Energy Development (RERED) project has used an output-based approach to increase electricity access in rural communities across Bangladesh. The project provides off-grid electrification based on renewable energy, such as solar home systems (SHS), and offers output-based aid subsidies to reduce the cost of the SHS for consumers who cannot afford to pay for the service. 

In Vietnam, large disparities exist in secondary enrollment between advantaged and disadvantaged regions, and there is a large gap between these groups in terms of upper secondary school completion. The disparity stems from low-income communities inability to afford tuition fees.

GPOBA and the World Bank grant supported 11 provinces to provide output-based subsidies to schools through reimbursed tuition fees, subsidizing enrollment of 8,145 students for three years. The project aimed to address persistent inequalities in learning outcomes, attendance, and completion rates by increasing access of poor students to upper secondary education (grades 10–12) in non-public secondary and professional secondary schools. 

In the Philippines, the government launched a Universal Health Care initiative in 2010, which mandated the Philippine Health Insurance Corporation (PhilHealth) to provide health insurance coverage to all Filipinos, especially the poor. It also put in place measures to improve and accredit healthcare facilities countrywide. However, access to accredited healthcare providers and to health insurance has remained a challenge for the poor due to lack of financial resources, low levels of awareness, and the geographic remoteness of facilities in rural areas. Access was also hampered by low uptake among the local government units responsible for enrolling poor constituents into the insurance program. In 2012, GPOBA provided support to expand insurance coverage amongst the poor and increasing the number of accredited healthcare providers in five provinces of the Eastern Visayas region—Leyte, Southern Leyte, Samar, Northern Samar and Eastern Samar, which are some of the poorest parts of the country. 

Kenya is one of the fastest urbanizing countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and incidence of urban poverty has been on rise. For urban slum dwellers, access to basic services such as water, sanitation, electricity, and transportation is very poor. GPOBA’s Kenya Electricity Expansion project encouraged the expansion of Kenya’s electricity grid into slum areas through an output-based aid approach. Extending the electrical grid into slum areas will not only allow the service provider to meet targets for new connections, but will reduce theft and vandalism, and raise quality of life in the slums. 

The objective for this activity was to increase sustainable access to formal grid-based electricity services within Vanuatu’s electricity concession service areas for low-income consumers through targeted subsidies. GPOBA support provided subsidization of connection charges in grid covered areas and purchase of stand-alone equipment in off-grid areas.

For the on-grid component, the scheme targets consumers within reach of the existing electricity grid networks on the islands of Efate, Espiritu Santo, Tanna and Malekula. It helped consumers overcome the financial barrier represented by high connection costs through a combination of one-off subsidies and extended period financing cost subsidies.

The off-grid component helped improve the affordability of solar home systems (SHS) for rural households with a subsidy towards the initial purchase cost and to improve the prospects of long-term sustainability of SHS with an incentive scheme to encourage households to save for maintenance, repair and replacement needs.

Objective: This project was to provide "transitional subsidies" to support a gradual increase in household charges for improved solid waste management (SWM) services in selected municipalities over a four-year period. The project complemented the World Bank's Nepal Emerging Towns Project and would use its existing institutional safeguards arrangements to a large extent. 

Most municipalities in Nepal either did not charge any fee for solid waste services or the fees charged have been far below cost recovery levels. While the intention was not to transfer the full costs of solid waste management to households, the municipalities were committed to increasing household charges (and hence household contribution to the cost of properly managing solid waste) to ensure the financial viability of providing the services and enable their expansion over time. However, the municipalities wanted to gradually phase-in the increase in charges, both to ease the burden on households and to demonstrate improvements in service performance before a significant portion of the costs of those improvements were passed onto the households.

GPOBA’s incentive-based approach was to tackle two problems: the ineffective collection of solid waste management fees and the missed opportunity for managing solid waste sustainably. The scheme was to bridge the gap between the cost of delivering improved SWM services, such as capital costs and operations and maintenance costs, and the revenues that municipalities could collect for these services.

Outputs: The project partially achieved its development objectives in four municipalities, and was successful in the following areas: establishing an institutional framework for SWM in municipalities; improving service delivery, with one of the participating municipalities (Dhankhuta) recognized as the cleanest city in Nepal; and strengthening financial sustainability by significantly increasing the revenues from SWM services.   

The project's objective as to provide sustainable access to sanitation and water services in selected low-income communities of Nairobi, by applying one-off OBA subsidies in order to make pro-poor sewerage and water connections financially viable.

Almost two-thirds of Nairobi’s four million inhabitants live in informal settlements that experience sparse coverage by the piped water network. GPOBA supported a project that incentivizes and increases access to water and sewerage services in low-income communities by facilitating the participation of domestic micro-finance institutions in the urban services sector.

The program enabled low-income households to come together to borrow the money needed for the initial cost of installing a metered stand pipe within their residential compound. A total of 4,920 sewer connections and 2,811 water connections were completed and verified, benefiting over 42,000 lower income people. An additional grant of $2.6 million was signed in August 2017 to scale up and expand the reach of the project, bringing the total funding to $6.93Million.

Objective: In Uganda, the grid electrification rate is one of the lowest in the world, at only about 18 percent. Power shortages remain one of the biggest obstacles to economic growth. To address this challenge, the Government of Uganda established the Rural Electrification Agency (REA) in 2001 and formulated a Renewable Energy Policy in 2006. Comprehensive reforms have since focused on making the sector financially viable, creating independent regulation of the electricity industry, and attracting private investment to the sector. GPOBA funding was to help make grid electricity accessible and affordable for low-income rural households. The OBA facility was to support provision of over 105,000 grid connections to low-income households (525,000 residents), representing about 10 percent of new connections country-wide from 2013–2016.

Outputs: The project was implemented by the Rural Electrification Agency in cooperation with eight licensed distribution companies. It established an OBA facility funded by the Government of Uganda, the EU, KfW, and GPOBA. The Facility connected 106,600 households, representing about 10% of the electrification rate of the country, of which GPOBA subsidies went to 36,900 connections. The scheme has been instrumental in increasing connection uptake in Uganda, and coupled with public awareness, has contributed to a reduction in illegal connections.