Other Infrastructure Study
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Publication
Managing Water for Sustainable Growth and Poverty Reduction : A Country Water Resources Assistance Strategy for Zambia
(World Bank, 2009-08-01)The country water resources assistance strategy for Zambia provides an analysis of the role of water in the economy and identifies the specific challenges, development opportunities and policies which inform an agreed framework for priority areas of assistance. Zambia lies entirely within the catchments of the Zambezi and Congo rivers and all internal runoff is shared by downstream and parallel riparian countries. This strategic geographic position in the upper reaches of both these catchments provides an important context for any water resources development. Zambia has played an important role in development of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) revised protocol on shared water courses (2000) and is engaged in the process of developing co-operative mechanisms with riparian states. However, the existing legal framework explicitly excludes any provisions for addressing issues on shared waters in the Zambezi and Luapula rivers, along with that portion of the Luangwa River which constitutes the boundary between Zambia and Mozambique. These account for more than 60 percent of Zambia's water resources. Economic development is undermined by physical scarcity of water. Despite the relative abundance, the uneven distribution of water resources across the country, high climatic variability (resulting in frequent floods and droughts) and degradation of water quality increasingly results in localized issues of scarcity. Despite continuing efforts to reduce pollution flow into the Kafue River, severe water quality issues persist in the Copper belt, posing serious health risks to the population and limiting the availability of water for productive purposes. The high dependency on hydropower, with 96 percent of the installed capacity produced within a 300km radius in the Kafue/Zambezi complex, will further increase vulnerability of the national economy to impacts associated with changing climatic conditions. -
Publication
Railways in Sub-Saharan Africa
(World Bank, 2009-06-01)The changed role of rail in Africa over the last thirty years has seen it move from a situation where many of the systems were carrying a high share of their country's traffic to one in which their market share has declined, their assets have steadily deteriorated, their quality of service has reduced, and they are in many instances only a minor contributor to solving the transport problems of the continent. The first railways south of the Sahara were built in South Africa in the 1860's and 1870's, with lines heading inland from the ports at Cape Town and Durban. The networks in what were then Cape Province, Natal and Transvaal continued to develop but it was not until the turn of the twentieth century that large-scale railway development began in other parts of the continent. In almost every case, the pattern was the same, with isolated lines heading inland from a port to reach a trading centre or a mine, and a few branch lines then being built over a period of time. As almost all the lines were constructed under colonial administrations, many of the lines were state-owned but several were also constructed as concessions or, in the case of some mineral developments, by the mining company as an integral part of its mining operation. Nevertheless, the rhetoric accompanying some of the transactions suggests that many politicians believe, or want to believe, that the concession award will be the prelude to very substantial investments by the concessionaires, particularly in infrastructure. To date, this has barely materialized, with most infrastructure improvements being done with international financial institution (IFI) or donor funds. The main issue for most sub-Saharan railways is whether concessioning is just a temporary solution or whether some alternative approach is needed to ensure a long-term future for railway systems providing acceptable levels of service. -
Publication
Zimbabwe Infrastructure Dialogue in Roads, Railways, Water, Energy, and Telecommunication Sub-Sectors
(Washington, DC, 2008-06)In the 1990s, Zimbabwe's economic growth began to slow following a balance of payments crisis and repeated droughts. By the late 1990s Zimbabwe's economy was in serious trouble driven by economic mismanagement, political violence, and the wider impact of the land reform program on food production. During 2007 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) contract by more than 6 percent, making the cumulative output decline over 35 percent since 1999. The unrelenting economic deterioration is doing long-term damage to the foundations of the Zimbabwean economy, private sector investment is virtually zero, infrastructure has deteriorated, and skilled professionals have left the country. With inflation accelerating, the Government introduced, in 2007, blanket price controls and ordered businesses to cut prices by half. Despite the strict price controls inflation continues to rise as the root cause of high inflation, monetization of the large public sector financing needs remains unaddressed. A large part of the high public sector deficit is due to quasi-fiscal spending by the central bank on mainly concessional credits and subsidized foreign exchange for priority sectors, unrealized exchange rate losses, and losses incurred by the central bank's open market operations to mop up liquidities. -
Publication
Lessons Learned from Mainstreaming HIV/AIDS in Transport Sector Projects in Sub-Saharan Africa
(Washington, DC, 2008-06)The Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV)/Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) pandemic burdens Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and continues to constrain its social and economic advancement. Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) has estimated that in southern Africa alone, 930,000 adults and children died of AIDS in 2005. This represents about one-third of AIDS deaths recorded globally that year. In addition, about 12 million children below the age of 17 in SSA are estimated to have lost one or both parents to AIDS. Africa Technical Transport Sector Unit (AFTTR) has made progress in mainstreaming HIV/AIDS in its portfolio. However, there is still more work ahead in ensuring that all projects are mainstreamed as needed. In this context, the transport sector board needs to continue supporting such future mainstreaming efforts by establishing a sector board strategy for HIV/AIDS activities on Bank-financed transport projects. The diverse nature of transportation activities implies that mainstreaming is both challenging and urgent. In 2000, the Africa transport team gave high priority to its contribution to the campaign against the HIV/AIDS pandemic and pledged to mainstream HIV/AIDS actions in the Bank's lending operations and at country level in the transport sector. The transport sector contributed significantly through integrating simple activities into its operations (such as HIV/AIDS contract clauses into bidding documents for road construction site workers). Similarly, the Bank financed a first-round workshop to prepare HIV/AIDS prevention policy in the workplace for Ministry employees. Its main objective is to develop and implement highly focused prevention interventions to reduce HIV/AIDS prevalence and slow down the spread of the disease in the transport sector. This document is subdivided in four sections. The first section gives background information on the transport sector and HIV/AIDS. The second section describes the Bank's transport sector activities, with particular focus on the Africa region and its achievements regarding HIV/AIDS. The third section presents the process and the results of the assessment of the Africa transport sector portfolio for HIV/AIDS mainstreaming. The fourth section enumerates the lessons learned as well as the recommendations made to the World Bank's Transport Sector Board and to stakeholders in the client countries. -
Publication
Africa : Irrigation investment Needs in Sub-Saharan Africa
(Washington, DC, World Bank, 2008-06)In Sub-Saharan Africa, rainfall is highly variable and, in many places, plainly in sufficient. Although irrigation has the potential to boost agricultural yields by at least 50 percent, food production in the region is almost entirely rain-fed. The irrigated area, extending over 6 million hectares, makes up just 5 percent of the total cultivated area, compared to 37 percent in Asia and 14 percent in Latin America. Two-thirds of that area is in three countries: Madagascar, South Africa, and Sudan. The 2005 Commission for Africa report, for example, called for a doubling of the region's irrigated area by 2015. To achieve expansion on that scale, however, we must deepen our understanding of the locations that could benefit most-and of the technologies best suited to those locations. One purpose of this study of irrigation in 24 countries, undertaken as part of the Africa infrastructure country diagnostic, is to identify agricultural areas, where irrigation investments promise to yield significant returns. A related purpose is to estimate the amount and scope of investment needed to secure those returns. Water for irrigation can be collected in two ways: through large, dam-based schemes, or through small projects based on collection of run-off from rainfall. -
Publication
Africa - Ebbing Water, Surging Deficits : Urban Water Supply in Sub-Saharan Africa
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-06)With only 56 percent of the population enjoying access to safe water, Sub-Saharan Africa lags behind other regions in terms of access to improved water sources. Based on present trends, it appears that the region is unlikely to meet the target of 75 percent access to improved water by 2015, as specified in the Millennium Development Goals (MDG). The welfare implications of safe water cannot be overstated. The estimated health and time-saving benefits of meeting the MDG goal are about 11 times as high as the associated costs. Monitoring the progress of infrastructure sectors such as water supply has been a significant by-product of the MDG, and serious attention and funding have been devoted in recent years to developing systems for monitoring and evaluating in developing countries. Piped water reaches more urban Africans than any other form of water supply-but not as large a share as it did in the early 1990s. The most recent available data for 32 countries suggests that some 39 percent of the urban population of Sub-Saharan Africa is connected to a piped network, compared with 50 percent in the early 1990s. Analysis suggests that the majority of those who lack access to utility water live too far away from the distribution network, although some fail to connect even when they live close by. Water-sector institutions follow no consistent pattern in Sub-Saharan Africa. Where service is centralized, a significant minority has chosen to combine power and water services into a single national multi-utility urban water sector reforms were carried out in the 1990s, with the aim of creating commercially oriented utilities and bringing the sector under formal regulation. One goal of the reforms was to attract private participation in the sector. -
Publication
Access, Affordability, and Alternatives : Modern Infrastructure Services in Africa
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-02)Africa lags well behind other developing regions in infrastructure access. The limited gains of the 1990s have not increased much in the 2000s. There is clear evidence that many countries are failing to expand services fast enough to keep ahead of rapid demographic growth and even faster urbanization. As a result, if present trends continue, Africa is likely to lag even further behind other developing regions, and universal access will be more than 50 years away in many countries. However, there is variation in performance across countries, even within the low and middle income brackets. A significant number of countries have succeeded in increasing the number of people who have access to water, electricity, and sanitation, by an annual average of 5-10 percent. Further investigation is warranted to explain what determines the superior performance of these countries. -
Publication
Ethiopia : Managing Water Resources to Maximize Sustainable Growth
(Washington, DC, 2006)This report looks at, and beyond, the management hydrological variability to interventions aimed at decreasing the vulnerability of the economy to these shocks. It helps clarify linkages between the country's economic performance and its water resources endowment and management. It then uses this analysis to recommend both water resource strategies and economic and sectoral policies that will enhance growth and insulate the Ethiopian people and economy from the often devastating, economy-wide effects of water shocks. This report finds that unmitigated hydrological variability currently costs the economy over one third of its growth potential. The very structure of the Ethiopian economy with its heavy reliance on rainfed subsistence agriculture makes it particularly vulnerable to hydrological variability. Its current extremely low levels of hydraulic infrastructure and limited water resources management capacity undermine attempts to manage variability. These circumstances leave Ethiopia's economic performance virtually hostage to its hydrology. -
Publication
The Evolution of Enterprise Reform in Africa : From State-Owned Enterprises to Private Participation in Infrastructure—and Back?
(Washington, DC, 2005-11)From the outset state-owned enterprises (SOE) financial and economic performance generally failed to meet the expectations of their creators and funders. There were African SOEs that performed, at least for a time, adequately and sometimes very well, by the most stringent of standards (e.g., Ethiopian Airlines, the Kenya Tea Development Authority, Sierra Leone's Guma Valley Water Company). But the good performers were heavily outnumbered by the bad. Numerous studies and reports from this period document the poor technical and financial performance of African SOEs in general and infrastructure SOEs in particular. Many of the latter failed to produce a sufficient quantity or a high quality of service or product, and posed increasing financial burdens on strained state budgets. -
Publication
Islamic Republic of Mauritania : Transport Sector Overview
(Washington, DC, 2004-09-29)The main Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) objectives for general transport policy are: a) lower costs, and ensure safe transport for passengers and goods; b) foster consistent national planning through multi-modal links between the country's major development centers; c) promote national integration, and linkages with the global economy; and, e) involve more private capital in financing the sector. The PRSP also includes specific objectives for transport modes, which are taken into account in this Economic and Sector Work (ESW). The purpose of this ESW is to provide a framework to help the Government analyze transport sector issues, and develop a transport sector strategy for the 2004-2009 period, and, identify issues and challenges that can be addressed through donor funded operations. This ESW focuses on road, air, and maritime transport, and analyzes strategic, and cross-cutting issues important to the sector as a whole. Recommendations include: corrections to the imbalance between investment and maintenance; improvement of the road maintenance financing mechanism; pursuit of a road investment program; strengthening the road management system; updating regulations to ensure effective liberalization of transport services; revision of the fiscal policy for the sector; improvement of the balance between supply and demand; and, identifying a mechanism for supporting the trucking industry.