Miscellaneous Knowledge Notes
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Publication
Floods and Urban Connectivity: A Toolkit for Prioritizing Resilience Investments – Demonstration Note with Case Studies from Kinshasa and Kigali
(Washington, DC, 2022-06)Cities are intricately interconnected socioeconomic systems, with transport networks connecting people to their jobs, health, and education facilities, and ensuring the smooth functioning of supply chains. When floods happen, they isolate people and firms from these vital networks, causing cascading disruptions and losses. Such floods are not limited to rare and extreme events. Especially in developing country cities, the lack of resilient infrastructure systems means that even regular rainfall events, for example, during rainy seasons, can cause havoc. Attention is often biased towards direct asset losses from floods, rather than the wider economic costs of disrupted networks. This is due primarily to the complex dynamics of economic and infrastructure networks. But public transport and road usage data are also often limited, especially when the predominant modes of transport are informal and walking. So how can we identify and prioritize cost-effective measures for urban resilience This note describes an analytical approach that can help prioritize investments in urban transport resilience and public transport, while also strengthening the economic case for such investments. -
Publication
Predicting Urban Employment Distributions: A Toolkit for More Targeted Urban Investment and Planning Decisions
(Washington, DC, 2022-06)Cities are intricately interconnected socioeconomic systems, with transport networks connecting people to their jobs, health, and education facilities, and ensuring the smooth functioning of supply chains. When floods happen, they isolate people and firms from these vital networks, causing cascading disruptions and losses. Such floods are not limited to rare and extreme events. Especially in developing country cities, the lack of resilient infrastructure systems means that even regular rainfall events, for example, during rainy seasons, can cause havoc. Attention is often biased towards direct asset losses from floods, rather than the wider economic costs of disrupted networks. This is due primarily to the complex dynamics of economic and infrastructure networks. But public transport and road usage data are also often limited, especially when the predominant modes of transport are informal and walking. So how can we identify and prioritize cost-effective measures for urban resilience This note describes an analytical approach that can help prioritize investments in urban transport resilience and public transport, while also strengthening the economic case for such investments. -
Publication
The Role of Existing Social Protection Programs in Alleviating Poverty Caused by Large-Scale Negative Shocks
(World Bank, Malaysia, 2021-09-02)The deep global recession induced by Covid-19 (coronavirus) is putting at risk the gains in poverty reduction made over the past three decades. The ability of existing social protection programs to prevent a permanent increase in poverty is thus of obvious importance. Yet, research on their performance during and after large aggregate shocks is largely missing. This Brief provides evidence by examining the performance of cash transfer programs in Indonesia and the Philippines following two recent natural disasters. One of them, Typhoon Yolanda, is an extreme weather event of the kind expected to become more common as global climate change intensifies. The results presented also contribute to the broader discussion on adaption to climate change and the need to provide adequate protection mechanisms to affected populations. -
Publication
World Bank Equity Policy Lab Vulnerability Tool to Measure Poverty Risk
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-12)Vulnerability to poverty refers to the likelihood that a household or an individual may fall below the poverty line in the event of a shock. Understanding vulnerability helps design policies to protect households and promote resilience. The World Bank's Equity Policy Lab (EPL) and the Global Solutions Group on the Welfare Implications of Climate Change, Fragility and Conflict Risks have developed a new tool to analyze the prevalence, causes, and sources of household vulnerability to poverty across different regions within a country. We use the example of Ethiopia to illustrate how countries can use the Vulnerability Tool to analyze vulnerability and adopt policies and programs to address it. -
Publication
Five Facts about Shocks in the Sahel
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-12)The high level of exposure to shocks, in particular climate-related and conflict induced shocks, across the Sahel region exacerbates the vulnerability of the population. It also increases the risk of non-poor falling into poverty. In 2018-2019 a new set of harmonized household surveys were conducted by each of the countries in the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) and in Chad. The surveys included Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Niger, and Senegal (Mauritania was not included). These surveys help identify the distributional impact of shocks in much greater detail for the region than before. This note presents the key findings of the surveys summarized in five facts. These findings can help inform the development of adaptive social protection systems across the Sahel. -
Publication
Adaptive Safety Nets for Rural Africa: Drought-Sensitive Targeting with Sparse Data
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-07)This paper combines remote-sensed data and individual child, mother, and household-level data from the Demographic and Health Surveys for 5 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa to design a prototype drought-contingent targeting framework for use in scarce-data contexts. To accomplish this, the paper: (i) develops simple and easy-to-communicate measures of drought shocks; (ii) shows that droughts have a large impact on child stunting in these five countries, comparable, in size, to the effects of mother’s illiteracy or a fall to a lower wealth quintile; and (iii) shows that, in this context, decision trees and regressions predict stunting as accurately as complex machine learning methods that are not interpretable.2 Taken together, the analysis lends support to the idea that a data-driven approach may contribute to the design of a transparent and easy-to-use drought-contingent targeting framework -
Publication
Transforming Rural Farm Livelihoods: The NRLM Journey
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-03)The agriculture sector is the largest employer in India, providing direct employment to more than fifty percent of the nation’s workforce. Small and marginal farmers with landholdings of less than two hectares comprise eighty-six percent of all agricultural labour, reflecting high land fragmentation and low economies of scale. Mainstream extension and agriculture support services are not customized for these farmer segments, limiting their capacity to access improved production inputs and technology. The situation is even more complicated for women farmers who constitute nearly forty-three percent of India’s agricultural labour force. The DAY-NRLM farm livelihoods strategy evolved against this background to leverage the program’s social infrastructure of sixty-eight million households mobilized into exclusively women based self healp groups (SHGs) and higher federations, in order to deliver intensive and targeted capacity building of small farmers and streamline access to credit for farm needs. Key sub-sectors under the DAY-NRLM farm livelihoods portfolio include agriculture, livestock and non-timber Forest Produce (NTFP), supported through a combination of programs including the Mahila kisan sashaktikaran pariyojna (MKSP), National rural livelihoods project (NRLP) and Sustainable livelihoods and adaptation to climate change (SLACC). The farm livelihoods strategy under DAY-NRLM has evolved over the years from its initial focus on enhancing productivity through improved inputs and production methods, to a suite of interventions that address multiple entry points in the agriculture value chain. -
Publication
Location Matters: Welfare Among Urban and Rural Poor in Djibouti
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-01)This note presents aspects of welfare of urban and rural poor in Djibouti. With only 15 percent of Djibouti's population, rural areas host about 45 percent of the country's poor. As such, these areas require a comprehensive strategy that invests in infrastructure and service provision and better connection to cities. The urban poor are more numerous and concentrated in the Balbala community of the capital. A policy tool kit to promote high quality of public services, better education and employment opportunities for urban poor would be critical. -
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
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.