broadband strategies handbook.pdf - Khazar University

Finance Corporation, have also found a growing role in broadband development.24 Bilateral development agencies, such as the U.S. Agency forInternational Development, the U.K. Department for InternationalDevelopment, and the Japan International Cooperation Agency, have followedroughly similar trends.Support from international development organizations for broadbanddevelopment typically involves some combination of technical assistance,grants, loans, and credits. Output-based aid (OBA), which links financialsupport to results, is increasingly used to accelerate or expand access to arange of basic services (such as infrastructure, health care, and education)for the poor in developing countries. 25 Well-designed OBA schemessharpen the targeting of development outcomes, improve accountabilityfor the use of public resources, and provide stronger incentives for efficiencyand innovation. OBA schemes often use competition among firmsfor assigning cash subsidies. The Global Partnership on Output-BasedAid (GPOBA) is a group of donors and international organizations thatworks together to support OBA approaches. GPOBA has funded telecommunicationsprojects in Bolivia, Cambodia, Guatemala, Indonesia, andMongolia, as well as a study on new tools for universal service in LatinAmerica and a study on ICTs in the Pacific. GPOBA provided a US$5.5 milliongrant as seed money to establish a USF in Mongolia, which wouldcollect a levy on telecommunications bills and use it to extend service torural and nomadic areas that are not commercially viable on their own.Both GPOBA and the World Bank’s Private-Public Infrastructure AdvisoryFacility (PPIAF) provided grants for technical assistance to designthe universal service program and set up the fund (Dymond, Oestmann,and McConnell 2008). Box 4.5 discusses the role that the InternationalDevelopment Association is playing in Africa.Universal Access and Service Funds for Broadband DevelopmentThe financing of UAS has gone through various stages, ranging from crosssubsidiesthat finance nonprofitable areas under a monopolistic scenario tothe creation of UASFs financed by operator levies that support projects inmore competitive markets. A range of other solutions lies between thesetwo points. Historically, first-generation fund projects have been primarilytop-down (for example, Colombia and Peru), with the fund defining thelocations and requirements. However, in the last few years, bottom-up projectshave been tried in Chile and other countries. In Sub-Saharan Africa, thetendency has been toward top-down projects, primarily allocated throughcompetitive processes such as least-cost subsidy bids. Chapter 2 discussesExtending Universal Broadband Access and Use 181