Miscellaneous Knowledge Notes
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Sub-Saharan Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa, home to more than 1 billion people, half of whom will be under 25 years old by 2050, is a diverse ...
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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
Tanzania: A Simple Teacher Incentive System Can Improve Learning
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-12)Tanzania devotes about one-fifth of government spending to education, focusing much of the funding on expanding school access. Primary school enrollment rates have surged, yet the quality of education services and learning outcomes remain poor, with only 38 percent of children aged 9–13 able to read or do arithmetic at the second grade level. Teachers play a critical role in helping children learn, but in Tanzania, many do not show up to teach. Poor motivation and lack of accountability have contributed to the high absenteeism and commensurate loss of instructional time. One way to strengthen teacher motivation and management is through performance pay. Teacher incentive schemes link bonuses or other rewards to specific targets, whether outputs (e.g., verified classroom presence) or outcomes (e.g., student test score improvement). Performance pay can help achieve learning results at low cost compared to teacher base salaries. In Tanzania, the Results in Education for All Children (REACH) Trust Fund supported a randomized control trial comparing two types of teacher performance pay systems and their effect on early grade learning. -
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. -
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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. -
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Cameroon - Can School Grants and Teacher Incentives be Used to Increase School Access and Improve Quality?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-02)The Results in Education for All Children (REACH) Trust Fund at the World Bank funded a feasibility study and a pre-pilot of performance-based school grants and teacher incentives among 20 rural primary schools in Cameroon. The purpose was to assess whether these RBF mechanisms could feasibly be used to improve transparency, financial management, and monitoring at the school level, increase community satisfaction, and draw lessons from the implementation of these RBF mechanisms to enable the initiative to be scaled up throughout Cameroon. While it is not possible to draw conclusions about the effect of this RBF program on education access or quality given the short time period and small sample size, this pre-pilot demonstrated that RBF is feasible in rural primary schools in Cameroon and highlighted the importance of several critical preconditions that must be in place for RBF to be effective. These preconditions include a simple and context-appropriate design, clear communication with key stakeholders, effective monitoring tools to assess school and teacher performance, and community involvement. -
Publication
Zanzibar: Can Goal-setting and Incentives Improve Student Performance?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-02)The Results in Education for All Children (REACH) Trust Fund at the World Bank funded an evaluation that measured how two different incentive approaches affected the academic performance of grade 9 students in Zanzibar (Tanzania). The first approach allowed students to set personal goals at the beginning of the school year regarding their performance by the end of the year. The second approach combined this goal-setting exercise with non-financial rewards such as certificates or in-kind prizes for students who met their goals. These approaches were designed to answer the following questions: (i) whether students setting goals for themselves has any effect on their performance in school and (ii) whether this effect is strengthened when combined with non-financial incentives. -
Publication
Using Satellite Imagery to Revolutionize the Creation of Tax Maps
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-08)Globally, cities rely on property taxes as a key source of revenues to finance the services that enhance its long-term competitiveness and counter the negative aspects of density. In developing countries, the technical complexity of ensuring that tax rolls are complete and valuations current is often perceived as a major barrier to bringing in more property tax revenues. This policy paper shows how high-resolution satellite imagery makes it possible to assess the completeness of existing tax maps by estimating built-up areas based on building heights and footprints. Together with information on sales prices from the land registry, targeted surveys, and routine statistical data, this makes it possible to use mass valuation procedures to generate tax maps. The example of Kigali illustrates the reliability of the method and the potentially far-reaching revenue impacts. Estimates based on modelling show that heightened tax compliance and a move to a one percent ad valorem tax would yield a tenfold increase in revenue from public land. -
Publication
Mozambique: Can Information and Incentives Increase School Attendance?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-03)Although more children than ever are starting school in Africa, in many countries dropout rates remain high and few students complete their schooling, especially girls. Results-based financing (RBF) has been used in many developing countries to attempt to incentivize various stakeholders such as students, parents, and teachers to achieve better results. RBF mechanisms work by linking financial incentives to measurable results, for example school attendance, dropout rates, or student test scores. Conditional cash transfers (CCTs) are one such RBF mechanism that has been used in many developing countries to incentivize individuals to take actions that they may not otherwise take, such as attending school or using preventive health services. CCTs work by giving individuals a cash transfer, conditional on verification that they have completed the prescribed behavior. CCTs have been shown to be effective in increasing school attendance in many countries, but their cost and complexity makes them difficult to manage for countries with limited administrative and budgetary capacity.