It is often forgotten that many people around the world live without basic services, such as roads, electricity, water and telephones, all of which are the building blocks of development. As the international community prepares to gather in Monterrey, Mexico next month to discuss how to finance global development, the World Bank says that more funds must to be allocated to provide infrastructure for the poor and meet basic development goals.

The World Bank has estimated that a doubling in official development assistance, combined with increased private sector development, is needed to finance these infrastructure needs.

"The needs are vast," Nemat Shafik, World Bank Vice President for Private Sector Development and Infrastructure, told a press conference yesterday, citing the Voices of the Poor study, which brought together voices of 60,000 poor people from around the world. When asked what they wanted, poor people put key services like roads, water, sewage, electricity and health care at the top of their list.

Making progress on infrastructure is also central to achieve the goal of halving poverty in the world by 2015, Shafik stressed. "In many ways, infrastructure investments underpin virtually all of the Millennium Development Goals the world's leaders have been talking about in the recent year."

Some 1.2 billion people currently lack access to drinkable water, while 2.4 billion lack access to adequate sanitation. An estimated 2.5 billion lack access to modern energy supplies, often meaning no light for studying or learning and only dirty fuel to burn for heating and cooking (leading to respiratory illness). And, for the 900 million rural dwellers in developing countries who live without reliable roads, access to markets, jobs and clinics is limited.

Regionally, the data are just as sobering. In Sub-Saharan Africa, less than 8 percent of the population is connected to the power grid system. "That means 92 percent of Africa is in darkness," Shafik said.

Shafik said that the World Bank is well equipped to deliver infrastructure services, explaining that the Bank's approach to infrastructure provision has evolved from a focus on large public utilities to an emphasis on innovative solutions involving non-state actors.

Shafik also referred to a crisis of financing for infrastructure, with a collapse by half since the mid nineties. "The public sector has withdrawn from financing infrastructure, thinking the private sector could carry the burden. And after 1997, the private sector has also collapsed. And so the needs remain incredibly huge, and yet at the same time what we're saying is it's not just an issue of volume of investments. We're also saying we know how to do this differently now. We know how to structure private-public partnerships. We know how to try and encourage the private sector to get in. And we know how to target in a much smarter way than we did in the past."

"Attracting private investment into infrastructure is an increasingly important part of the way we do this business," she added.

The lack of infrastructure hurts the rural poor as well as the urban poor. Currently no one is worse served than the rural poor. The absence of basic infrastructure services limits their access to markets and effectively excludes them and their children from education, health, and other services.

However, while today the majority of poor people live in rural areas, that picture will change in the next 25 years. Two billion more people will be born in developing countries. Most will live in urban areas, which will double in size and result in overcrowded slums without adequate services. Upgrading slums, providing affordable clean water and roads to connect the poorest urban areas, and engaging the urban poor as partners in the process are indispensable in tackling poverty.

Major investments will be required just to keep the current coverage levels stable. In Africa alone, The Bank's estimates that the investment requirements in infrastructure are over $18 billion per year.

Useful Links: Click here to read the press release. Click here to view the transcript of the press conference. Click here for more information about the World Bank's work on infrastructure.