Infrastructure

Violence and the threat of violence holds back economic growth in urban areas, limiting women’s mobility, access to economic opportunities, and the ability to move into higher paid or more secure jobs. This paper looks at how to build gender-transformative safe spaces programmes to improve women and girls’ safety and mobility in urban spaces.

In 2016 ICED undertook an extensive review of best practices found across DFID and other donor programmes which utilise technical assistance to improve investment in, and delivery of infrastructure in developing countries. The review undertook case studies of 10 high performing technical assistance programmes which had achieved significant outcomes in infrastructure delivery, finding a number […]

Despite being the largest economy in Africa, Nigeria is severely constrained by low quality, decaying infrastructure and inadequate power supply. Responding to these constraints DFID established the Nigeria Infrastructure Advisory Facility (NIAF), a demand driven technical assistance programme to support more Phase 1 ran from November 2007 to November 2011 (£32.6 million). NIAF II continued […]

Infrastructure Development Company Ltd. (IDCOL), a government finance institution, has been instrumental in scaling-up electricity access through off-grid solar home systems (SHS) across Bangladesh. This public-private partnership has successfully rolled out approximately 4.1 million SHS since 2003 using innovative financial and technology packages. However the IDCOL’s SHS programme has had to modify its original design […]

This case study describes an innovative solar infrastructure investment facilitation platform developed by the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and launched in Zambia in January 2015 with the aim to be replicated in other African countries.

Traditionally, donor programmes have been established using a simple formula, whereby SPs estimate the total overhead for a programme through tender, against a fixed set of inputs and workplan. In these programmes, clients need to wait months or years before assistance is deployed due to procurement procedures, by which time resource allocation, costs, and plans […]

Energy reform is highly political, and any attempts to support sector reform without an understanding of the domestic and international political landscape are likely to fail. Whilst all politics are defined by local circumstances, useful learning is emerging on how to build political commitment and maintain it through the reform process. This paper seeks to […]