We celebrate 5 years of navigating infrastructure finance & PPPs together – thanks to you readers, experts!

There’s a story behind the lights you flick on, the water gushing in your shower, or the toll bridge stretching across an otherwise impassable river.

Most people on this planet interact with infrastructure every hour of the day. But we rarely pause to think about the effort it takes to create and maintain it. Or how it is paid for. Or even how important it is for the economic development of our communities and countries.

The bulk of this blog’s readers know that before an infrastructure asset can be built, an array of studies is needed to make sure it makes business sense, that it’s technically sound, that the necessary laws and regulations are in place—and that it won’t harm the environment or local communities.

And when it comes to who pays, the relevant government agencies need to contemplate how to allot scarce resources and potentially broaden the financing base. They are helped along by awareness of different models and experiences, new tools and research, and financial actors that have important roles to play.

This is the crux of our blog program, Getting Infrastructure Finance Right.

This week we’re celebrating five years of publishing, bringing sometimes arcane topics to the attention of specialists and dilettantes alike. Five years ago, the World Bank launched this program as the PPP Realities Blog to answer a need: its founders found PPP discussion rhetoric-rich and data-poor. Blog topics have broadened over the years to encompass infrastructure finance more generally—still with a heavy dose of PPP content—to reflect agreement among countries, international organizations, and financial institutions that many other forms of capital can be tapped to address the developing world’s gaping infrastructure deficit.

Guest bloggers—private sector representatives, academics, government officials, and others—add to the richness of the blog’s perspective and we thank them deeply. Big thanks go to World Bank Group PPP and infrastructure finance specialists who work to deliver their messages succinctly and accessibly via this platform. In these five years, we’ve published close to 500 posts that individually and collectively tell a story about how smart infrastructure finance contributes to more services to more people across the globe. We’re pleased that our blog now reaches more than 30,000 active subscribers each week.

In celebration of our five-year milestone, I’d like to leave you with 10 posts the team and I think are worth another read. What were some of your favorites? Please feel free to share them below and suggest topics you’d like to see treated—or treated more.

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You can also find the World Bank’s Infrastructure Finance, PPPs & Guarantees Group on Twitter—see you @WBG_PPP!

1. COVID-19 and infrastructure: A very tricky opportunity
    
2. On unsolicited proposals and love
    
3. Moving gender-lens infrastructure investment from niche to mainstream: What will it take?
    
4. SDGs and PPPs: What's the connection?
    
5. Boosting access to market-based debt financing for subnational entities
    
6. 10 important questions to ask the public sector when pursuing a PPP procurement
    
7. New from the PPP Knowledge Lab: The Public-Private Partnership Reference Guide online
    
8. How are PPPs really financed?
    
9. How can we accommodate climate-related risks in infrastructure?
    
10. What does Teddy Roosevelt have to do with PPPs? Thinking about the origin—and the future—of conservation

This blog is managed by the Infrastructure Finance, PPPs & Guarantees Group of the World Bank. Learn more about our work here.