Miscellaneous Knowledge Notes

584 items available

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http://hdl.handle.net/10986/9388

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Lessons in Investment Promotion: The Case of Invest India

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-07-26) Phillips, Joe ; Heilbron, Armando ; Kher, Priyanka

Foreign direct investment (FDI) can contribute significantly towards India reaching its aspiration of 8 percent growth per annum. Prior to 2009, India did not have a national dedicated organization with a specific mandate to promote and facilitate FDI. Invest India was then established, but it was not until 2015 that it was empowered to ramp up its investment promotion efforts, with the resources and reach to be fully active in the FDI marketplace. Invest India’s journey can be described against 9 critical success factors (CSFs) that chart how the agency responded to its challenges, to now deliver sustained success evidenced by facilitating USD 31 billion of FDI and direct creation of nearly 303,900 jobs. In part, Invest India has contributed to India’s stellar FDI performance in 2020, when the country reached another record of USD 64 million, against a global drop of 35 percent (UNCTAD 2021). While some challenges remain, Invest India’s journey provides valuable learnings for other investment promotion agencies (IPAs), which in the context of the Covid-19 crisis, will need to be in a period of review and reform.
India - Can Results-Based Incentives Encourage Teachers to Attend School?

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-07) Vivek, Kumar ; Bhattacharjee, Pradyumna ; Mani, Subha ; Avinav, Kumar

The Results in Education for All Children (REACH) Trust Fund supports and disseminates research on the impact of results-based financing on learning outcomes. The EVIDENCE series highlights REACH grants around the world to provide empirical evidence and operational lessons helpful in the design and implementation of successful performance-based programs. A REACH-supported study tested the impact of results-based incentives for meso-level officials (Resource Persons, or RPs) and teachers on teacher attendance at school. The incentives led to a 15 percentage point increase in the likelihood of a teacher being present, averaged across audit visits. The training increased the amount of time RPs spent mentoring teachers, but this increased mentoring did not lead to any changes in teaching practices.
Effects of a Multifaceted Education Program on Enrollment, Learning, and Gender Equity: Evidence from Rajasthan, India

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-12) Delavallade, Clara ; Griffith, Alan ; Thonrton, Rebecca

The Sustainable Development Goals set a triple educational objective: improve access to, quality of, and gender equity in education. This note documents the effectiveness of a multifaceted educational program pursuing these three objectives simultaneously. Using an experiment in 229 schools in rural Rajasthan, India, this study measures the effects of the program on students’ school participation and academic performance over two years, as well as its heterogeneous impacts by gender and initial learning ability. The findings show that the program increased student enrollment and retention, with the largest effects observed among girls. There is no evidence that the program differentially attracted lower-ability students. There were large learning gains in both years, where the learning outcomes of boys and girls improved equally. These findings suggest that multifaceted interventions can overcome the tradeoffs that often arise when pursuing multiple objectives in educational interventions.
Care Work and Intra-Household Tensions during COVID-19: Evidence from an Online Survey of Gig Workers in India

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-08-01) Abel, Martin ; Tas, Emcet O. ; Zahra, Najaf ; D'Lima, Tanya ; Kalashyan, Anna ; Sethi, Jayati

This note examines gender disparities in care work and intra-household tensions among online gig workers in India. The data was collected as part of an online experiment in April 2020, shortly after lockdown measures were implemented to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19). The findings show that childcare and eldercare responsibilities have increased for everyone during the lockdown, but women have disproportionately felt the burden of increased care work. Further, there was an increase in domestic violence, pointing to added stress and intra-household tensions. Policy makers need to incorporate a gender lens in emergency responses in order to promote women’s safety and wellbeing during COVID-19 and beyond.
Transforming Rural Non-Farm Livelihoods: The NRLM Journey

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-03) Gupta, Arshia ; Nair, Vinod

Rural India is primarily an agri-based economy. Over-dependence on agriculture has meant declining percapita rural income which has gradually initiated a shift towards the non-farm sector. This transition from agriculture to non-farm sectors is considered an important source of economic growth. DAY-NRLM, which has been instrumental in reaching out to sixty-eight million rural poor women, witnessed a similar shift towards non-agricultural sources of income. This trend encouraged DAY-NRLM to adopt dedicated entrepreneurship promotion measures. Even though, NRLM is more than a decade old, enterprise development programmes have been initiated only in the last five years. These initiatives are expected to gain pace and momentum through National rural economic transformation project (NRETP), which aims to identify existing enterprises with growth potential and provide dedicated services to help them scale-up.
Learnings From Community-Based Small-Scale Irrigation in Tribal Areas of Jharkhand, India

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-03) Singh, Pratyush ; Sharma, Stuti ; Bihari, Bipin

JOHAR is a pioneer in enabling tribal communities to be an integral stakeholder in development by ensuring availability, accessibility and utilization of water resources for agricultural development. JOHAR supports 200,000 small and marginal farmers in primarily rainfed, backward, drought prone, upland and tribal areas of Jharkhand. It facilitates a unique approach, that of "community-led irrigation" which brings water directly to the fields, and fosters community ownership from the onset of project conception, to survey and implementation, right through to operations and maintenance. This note highlights JOHAR's focus on promoting such an approach through engaging the community, particularly women in planning, implementation, monitoring and overall management of their irrigation infrastructure.
Institution Building and Capacity Building in NRLM

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-03) Mitra, Shouvik ; Kande, Narender ; Rani, P. Usha

The main design principle behind self help groups (SHGs) organizations of rural poor women at the village level was to empower women by mobilizing them into small groups, facilitating interactions and financial literacy, and federating them into higher-order organization to unleash the potential of self help. The movement was initiated in the late 1980s by the Mysore resettlement and development agency (MYRADA) in Karnataka and by professional assistance for development action (PRADAN) in Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan. In 2000, the World Bank supported the Andhra Pradesh district poverty initiative project (APDPIP or VELEGU) project, which leveraged their existing work on SHGs, integrated new lessons and scaled-up the SHG program across the state. In order to leverage the World Bank experience of supporting livelihoods projects in states like AP, Bihar, Odisha and Tamil Nadu, the government of India (GoI) approved a World Bank supported National Rural Livelihoods Project (NRLP) to be implemented in thirteen major States in the country and aimed at creating proof. The World Bank designed the NRLP in the year 2011 with a vision to mainstream SHGs as the primary intervention strategy for rural development. The major pillars for SHG functions were defined as institution building, financial inclusion, livelihood strengthening, women’s empowerment, vulnerability reduction with partnerships and convergence as a cross-cutting theme. Experience suggests that triggering of women’s agency at the community level through provision of strategic inputs coupled with a conducive micro-environment not only enhances a woman’s well-being within her household but also has the potential to transform the community at large.
Social Inclusion: Implementation, Outcomes and Key Learnings

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-03) Singh, Varun ; Rani, P. Usha

The Government of India (GoI) approved the National Rural Livelihoods Mission (NRLM) in June 2011 to implement a renewed demand-driven strategy of rural poverty alleviation and sustainable livelihoods, based on universal social mobilization, building community -managed institutions of the poor, and universal financial inclusion. The central objective of the NRLM is to ‘establish efficient and effective institutional platforms of the rural poor that enable them to increase household (HH) incomes through livelihood enhancements and improved access to financial and public services.’
Leveraging Community Institutions to Support Agri-Business and Livelihoods in Jharkhand

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-03) Bihari, Bipin ; Khanuja, Jasmeet ; Kothari, Anand ; Newton-Lewis, Tom ; Singh, Gurpreet

The JOHAR project was initiated in 2017 to aid targeted rural producer households to diversify and enhance their household income, and achieve a significant increase in real income until 2023 in selected blocks of rural Jharkhand. The JOHAR project recently completed a baseline for the project evaluation using a randomized controlled trial, supplemented with a non-random control group outside the program area that provides a counterfactual based on an additional quasi-experimental design. The purpose of this note is to present key baseline results and how they validate the project's theory of change. It summarizes the findings from the baseline, presents the status-quo on potential JOHAR beneficiaries, and outlines how the project can achieve its target of enhancing and diversifying the income of rural producer households.
Pioneering New Approaches to Rural Agri-Entrepreneurship Skills Development in Jharkhand, India

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-03) Kumar, Vineet ; Behera, Tapas Ranjan ; Bihari, Bipin

Jharkhand has a large proportion of marginal and small landholders (84 percent), who mainly practice rain-fed, single-crop subsistence farming, cultivating a low-yielding variety of paddy. A vast majority of these rural producers are unable to transition to high-value commodities. The average landholding per farmer is 1.17 hectares. Of the 3.43 million hectares of cultivable land, only 2.23 million hectares (65 percent) is being farmed leaving nearly 35 percent of cultivable land fallow. Small livestock rearing and fish farming in catchment farm ponds, tanks and reservoirs could be important potential sources of livelihood for these rural households. Collection and sale of non-timber forest produce (NTFP) contributes substantially to incomes of forest dwellers and inhabitants of hamlets surrounding forest areas, who are mostly disadvantaged and landless communities belonging to particularly vulnerable tribal groups. This note explains the skilling and rural agri-entrepreneurship approach, process design, learnings, and the way forward of the JOHAR skilling initiative.