Miscellaneous Knowledge Notes
589 items available
Permanent URI for this collection
Items in this collection
1 - 10 of 11
-
Publication
South Africa - Results-Based Financing and the Book Supply Chain: Motivating Writers and Publishers to Create Quality Storybooks
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-12)Literacy serves as an essential building block for learning, so when children master reading, they are more likely to succeed in school generally. To support the South African government’s campaign to improve literacy rates and foster a love of reading among children, room to read implemented an initiative that included results-based elements to increase the availability of affordable, quality storybooks in African languages. The project brought together public and private sector players in the book supply chain to develop new national standards on storybooks and translations, and helped to identify and build capacity of smaller publishers and writers to publish African-language storybooks. In doing so, the project demonstrated how results-based financing can be effective in the production and procurement stages of the book chain in South Africa. Results-based financing motivated and engaged publishers and writers to participate and stay engaged in the two-year project, which armed them with the skills and knowledge they need to continue to create and publish quality storybooks on their own. The success of the South Africa project underscores the potential of using innovative models such as pooled procurement, open licensing, and one day one book workshops along with results-based financing to increase the availability of quality children’s books in a cost-efficient manner. By strengthening the book chain, the project ultimately helped to foster children’s love of reading and helped them to become better learners. -
Publication
Gender Inequality, Human Capital Wealth, and Development Outcomes in Uganda
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-08)Reducing gender inequality makes economic sense apart from being the right thing to do. Achievinggender equality and empowering all women and girls is the fifth sustainable development goal and is a top priority for governments. Countries can achieve this goal if they take appropriate steps. This note is part of a series that aims to measure the economic cost of gender inequality globally and regionally by examining the impacts of gender inequality in a wide range of areas and the costs associated with those impacts. Given that gender inequality affects individuals throughouttheir life, economic costs are measured in terms of losses in human capital wealth, as opposed to annual losses in income or economic growth. The notes also aim to provide a synthesis of the available evidence on successful programs and policies that contribute to gender equality in multiple areas and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This note has two main objectives. The first is to estimate potential losses in national wealth due to inequality inearnings between men and women in Uganda. The second is to document the impact of gender inequality in selected other domains, including fertility and population growth, health outcomes for young children, and measures of women’s agency. -
Publication
Who Wins and Who Loses from Staple Food Price Spikes?: Welfare Implications for Mozambique
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-06)Changes in food prices – triggered frequently by natural disasters, macroeconomic shocks or regional market disruptions– can lead to large household welfare effects. At over 60 and 40 percent, food budget shares remain high in rural and urban Mozambique, respectively. Furthermore, nearly 70 percent of the population depends on agriculture for their livelihoods. To determine the net impact of food price changes on consumption and poverty, we performed incidence analysis combining household and farmer survey data with disaggregated, market-level price data on major staples (maize, rice, and cassava). Overall, we find evidence for a large net negative welfare effect of price rises in rural areas, and a small, negative effect in the urban areas. For instance, A 10 percent increase in maize prices is associated with an average reduction of 1.2 percent in consumption per capita in rural areas and 0.2 percent in urban areas. Not all households are affected equally. Overall, the negative impacts are larger for the bottom half of the distribution. As a result, the sharp food price spike observed in 2016–17 may have translated into a poverty increase of 4-6 percentage points, with some of the poorest provinces bearing much of the brunt. These findings underscore the importance of improving the functioning of agricultural input and output markets, developing early food security warning systems, and increasing the availability of rapidly scalable safety nets. -
Publication
Collecting Robust Real-Time High Frequency Price Data in Fragile Settings
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-03)To embark on a sustainable pathway toward development, effective policy responses must be implemented quickly and based on evidence. This requires reliable, timely data, which is often unavailable especially in fragile settings. An innovative High Frequency Survey (HFS) infrastructure offers a modern data collection system to fill critical data gaps. It can provide quantitative data to inform programs and policies, often linked to resilience in fragile settings. Using the cases of Somalia and South Sudan, this note describes the design and setup of such a HFS infrastructure and illustrates how high frequency price data can effectively support decision-making even in the event of an economic or humanitarian crisis. -
Publication
Extreme Weather and Poverty Risk: Evidence from Multiple Shocks in Mozambique
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-03)Thanks to strong economic growth over the last two decades, poverty in Mozambique has decreased and the average household is now more likely to access basic education, health, and housing. Yet, the country is still ravaged by intense and frequent weather disasters. To determine the scale and nature of the impacts of these shocks, this paper analyzes the vulnerability of rural livelihoods across three different extreme weather events: droughts, floods and cyclones. The study finds that per capita food and non-food consumption and asset ownership are reduced among households affected by any of the three weather shocks. Their children are less likely to attend school, have a higher probability of falling sick and show higher engagement in paid and unpaid work. What’s more, staple food prices are disrupted and remain affected nearly a year after the disaster. Helping households confront these events requires comprehensive risk management policies, including making agriculture more resilient to weather, improving the functioning of credit and insurance markets, facilitating economic diversification and market access, and increasing the availability of flexible safety nets – all before the shocks occur. -
Publication
Rethinking Electrification in Sub-Saharan Africa: Why we Should Stop Counting and Start Thinking Big
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019)If African nations want to see their economies transform, the issue of electricity must be tackled head-on. Expansion needs investment too, and for that, utilities must recover their costs. Yet all over the region utilities are running at a loss. This report takes a broader look at the issue to show that the problem in Africa is not power but poverty. It shows that affordability, reliability, and coordination are the missing links to making utilities financially viable and expanding their consumer base. The report emphasizes that access to electricity cannot be a stand-alone goal. Policymakers must rethink their approach to electrification by placing the productive use of electrification at center stage. Given the resource constraints, governments need to coordinate investments in other aspects of their infrastructure at the same time as they invest in electricity. Policies and programs need to focus on improving access to markets through better roads and expanding credit for new businesses. In this way, electricity can energize agriculture in rural areas and industry in urban areas. This report shows that, to generate income, create jobs, and alleviate poverty in Africa, electricity has to be part of a package. -
Publication
What We Learned about Corporate Governance and Code Development in Sub-Saharan Africa
(International Finance Corporation, Washington, DC, 2018-05)This document is a high-level account of discussions held and conclusions reached during theroadshow. It describes 10 learnings attained over the more than two decades of experience in code development in South Africa. Under each of these learnings, we present the South African experience as well as experiences shared in the various countries where the roadshow was conducted. The purpose of this document is to provide guidance to IFC staff, regulators, and private institutions (such as institutes for directors and corporate governance) for developing codes of corporate governance in Sub-Saharan African countries and potentially other developing economies. The objective is for the insights shared in this document to support achievement of the following results: a more effective process of code development, code content that will be easier for organizations to implement, a higher degree of commitment by the users of the code and good governance that will result in better outcomes for organizations as well as the communities and countries in which they operate. This guidance document should be read in conjunction with the IFC Toolkit for Developing Corporate Governance Codes of Best Practice. Before sharing the learnings, it is important to understand the context for the application of corporate governance in Africa. This will provide perspective on why some of the learnings are vital. Organizations—the users of codes of corporate governance—operate in a broader context, which King IV calls the “triple context,” consisting of the economy, society, and natural environment in which organizations operate. In Africa, depending on the country, the triple context may appear as economic and political instability, lack of or failing infrastructure, skills shortage, inequality, water and food scarcity due to environmental vulnerability, and corruption. Furthermore, the application of corporate governance is not mature in all African countries. An IFC study on the link between governance and corporate performance examined the degree of African firms’ adherence to certain aspects of corporate governance. If those foundations are weak, it is unlikely that other areas of corporate governance could be strong. However, it is encouraging that, taken together, the firms scored above 50 percent on all five of the dimensions assessed. Organizations in Africa operate in a challenging triple context, and much work must be done to gain maturity in the corporate governance practices they follow. Codes for corporate governance should be cognizant of these realities. -
Publication
Urban Water and Sanitation in Tanzania: Remaining Challenges to Providing Safe, Reliable, and Affordable Services for All
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-02)The purpose of the brief Urban Water and Sanitation in Tanzania: Remaining Challenges to Providing Safe, Reliable and Affordable Services for All is to outline the ways in which the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) framing of water and sanitation is helping us to understand not previously seen problems with urban services. For water services we see a reduction in the gap in access to improved and piped supply between rich and poor since 2005, with overall coverage currently standing at 85 in 2016. However, the low reliability of supply leads to a dependence on more expensive, informal service providers as a secondary source. This dependence can hit the poor hardest. In contrast, for sanitation we see a persistent and widening gap between rich and poor in improved access with a high proportion of shared facilities. Furthermore, as the SDG standards point out, lack of safe treatment and disposal of fecal matter can lead to a greater risk of contaminated water being ingested by the population, increasing the likelihood of waterborne disease such as cholera. Tanzania's cities, have experienced frequent outbreaks of cholera, with 4,985 cases reported in 2017. -
Publication
Benefits for Women in Nile Economic Development
(World Bank, Entebbe, 2015-05-01)Women and girls often risk being left behind in development, not being fully informed or involved in decision making about issues that can have a real impact on their lives. Sometimes, they are already disadvantaged by cultural and legal norms that affect their rights to resources. Working together to develop the Nile resource, the 10 countries involved in the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) are making it ‘business as usual’ to ensure gender equality in the economic benefits emerging from their shared efforts. -
Publication
Cooperation on the Nile: Bringing Down the Glass Wall
(World Bank, Entebbe, 2015-05-01)A unique cooperation program, working across different countries with varying national interests, stakeholders, and projects, has brought down the glass wall. Coordinated by the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI), this program has successfully built trust, strengthened capacity, and created an enabling environment for sustainable and equitable development of the Nile Basin water resources. Transboundary cooperation has advanced regional integration through identifying and developing joint investments. This note presents the journey so far by the Nile Basin member states in building regional cooperation, and the crucial role played by the NBI in the achievement.