Africa Region Findings & Good Practice Infobriefs

415 items available

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/10986/9389

These briefs report on ongoing operational, economic, and sector work carried out by the World Bank and its member governments in the Africa Region.

Items in this collection

Now showing 1 - 10 of 104

Health Expenditures, Services and Outcomes in Africa
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2010-04) Peters, David H.; Kandola, Kami; Elemendorf, A. Edward; Chellaraj, Gnanaraj
In the past thirty years, Sub-Saharan African countries have made remarkable improvements in health conditions and status. However, they still suffer from some of the worst health problems in the world, and AIDS is making conditions much worse than they will be otherwise. This study, health expenditures, services, and outcomes in Africa considers 48 countries of Sub-Saharan Africa and outlines broad patterns of health spending, service delivery, mortality, fertility and nutrition in the early to mid-1990s. The study focuses on how to better monitor progress and use information to identify problems and improve health outcomes within and among different African countries. Good information about inputs, processes and results in the health sector is vital for policymakers to make intelligent choices about health strategies and investments, and often is simply not available. For purposes of the study, countries were classified as lowest-income, low-income and middle-income categories. Over three quarters of the African countries are low income or even lowest income countries, and nearly all have weak health management systems.
Burundi - Investing in Leadership Development through the Rapid Results Approach
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-08) World Bank
The government of Burundi appealed to the World Bank Institute (WBI) for help in strengthening the capacities of leadership to implement policies and programs that would achieve measurable results. The new government needed to make tough decisions on competing priorities, including allocating an estimated US$12 billion to achieve the millennium development goals, and carrying out reforms to ensure efficient allocation of public resources. The government understood it would need to invest in leadership development in order to drive change at the institutional level and achieve results, and that this would require more than the traditional classroom method of leadership training. Instead, the following approaches were needed: 1) training programs adapted to the needs of leaders; 2) a learning-by-doing approach to capacity development; and 3) a participatory approach to action planning, work planning, and defining modalities for resource management.
Mali - Private Sector Assistance Grant
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-03) Mastri, Lawrence
The principal objective of the project was to help foster the development of private sector enterprises, so that they could lead the growth of Mali's economy. The project aimed at putting in place mechanisms and measures to support the government's strategy of breaking from past reliance on the public sector. The project proposed to achieve this by: (a) completing implementation of improvements to the regulatory environment that had been introduced starting in the late eighties; (b) assisting a private business support structure, APEP, the Agence pour la Promotion de l'Entreprise Privee, to coordinate a program of institutional support to private non-financial enterprises; (c) improving the functioning of economic chambers (principally the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Mali), the Government's office charged with public enterprise reform, BEP, and departments of the administration responsible of administering regulations affecting private enterprises; and (d) inducing the strengthening of the banking sector and the preparation of a coherent financial sector strategy.
Ethiopia Health Sector Development Program
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2007-10) Mohan, P. C.
This brief discusses the progress made in the Ethiopia Health Sector Development Program. The program's aims were to develop a health system that provides comprehensive and integrated primary care services, primarily based at community health level facilities. It focuses on communicable diseases, common nutritional disorders, environmental health and hygiene, reproductive health care, immunization, the treatment and control of basic infectious diseases like upper respiratory tract infections, the control of epidemic diseases like malaria, and the control of sexually transmitted diseases especially HIV/AIDS. This brief gives a brief description of the programs components, results on the ground, problems encountered, and lessons learned.
Learning from the Extreme Poor : Participatory Approaches to Fostering Child Health in Madagascar
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2007-08) Blanchard, Caroline; Godinot, Xavier; Laureau, Chantal; Wodon, Quentin
Definitions of poverty in developing countries used by most development organizations focus on household income or consumption that falls below a given threshold, such as one dollar per capita per day, and on other quantified indicators. While such definitions have the merit of providing a standard by which to measure progress, the very poor use quite different terms and ideas to communicate what extreme poverty means to them. This paper discusses learning from the extreme poor in the form of participatory approaches to fostering child health in Madagascar.
Mozambique : Health Sector Recovery Program
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2006-08) Mohan, P. C.
The Health Sector Recovery Program ( HSRP ) - 1996-2003 -- was the first Bank-assisted project in Mozambique to move towards a sector-wide approach. Its objective was to support the Mozambican National Health Strategy, that is, the improvement of the health status of the population, in general, and a decrease in infant and child mortality in particular. The HSRP helped bring together the Ministry of Health and 16 other donors to support one coherent strategy. This Note describes the impact of the project on the ground and lists lessons learned.
The Tanzania Social Action Fund (TASAF) : Owning the Process of Measuring Impact and Achieving Results
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2006-07) Lenneiye, N.M.
The Tanzania Social Action Fund (TASAF) is now in its second phase, covering the period 2005-2009. It is focused on giving more voice to citizens at both community and lowest local government levels - village councils. While retaining direct community financing as a key empowering mechanism, it is being implemented through Local Government Authorities. Target beneficiaries are: i) communities with inadequate access to social services; ii) households with able-bodied adults suffering from food insecurity; and iii) individuals living in poor households affected by acute shocks (like HIV/AIDS). These three beneficiary groups will access resources from a National Village Fund using procedures that build on the lessons learned regarding accountability, incomes poverty, and improving impact links.
Social Marketing of Bednets in Tanzania
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2005-12) Nathan, Rose; Mponda, Hadji; Mshinda, Hassan
Malaria is still a devastating disease in sub Saharan Africa where it kills at least one million people every year (United Nations Children's Fund, or UNICEF 2003). Children are most vulnerable to malaria attacks, which kill more than 3,000 children every day, largely in Africa. At least 100 Tanzanian children die daily because of the disease. Another high-risk group is pregnant women. However, all other adults are also exposed to substantial risk of malaria. In Tanzania, control and care of malaria puts a huge burden on financial and economic costs both at micro and macro levels, thus translating into enormous poverty implications. As such, malaria has a potential in slowing down the achievement of the millennium development goals (MDGs) in countries where it is endemic as is the case in many parts of Tanzania.
Community-Based Health Insurance in Rwanda
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2005-11) Pathé Diop, Francois; Butera, Jean Damascene
Rwanda has lived one of the most tragic moments of its history with the genocide of 1994, which resulted in nearly one million deaths, and the destruction of the social fabric of the country. Mutual aid and community solidarity value systems have remained resilient traits of Rwanda's society, and continue to be translated in coping strategies in the health care area. After the 1994 war, however, mutual aid initiatives have emerged in the health sector as community responses to the reintroduction of user-fees in public, and mission health facilities. Building on these community initiatives, health authorities, and non-government organizations have moved these emerging strategies to a deliberate strategy of building community-based health insurance schemes in the health sector. Community-based health insurance schemes (CBHI) provided also a platform for the compilation of information to support the assessment of CBHI schemes, and to familiarize health sector actors, and partners with the strategies needed to support their implementation on a large scale. CBHI schemes in Rwanda are health insurance organizations based on a partnership between the community and health care providers. As consensus built-up on the benefits of the CBHI schemes, a multi-level leadership developed in the country to provide support to the adaptation, and extension of the schemes. Political leaders at the central level, starting from the Presidency, called for the mobilization of all actors to support the implementation of CBHI schemes throughout the country.
Democratizing HIV Communication
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2005-07) Thomas Scalway
Information and communication are the key assets within the global knowledge economy. Economic growth, market access, and the ability to manage risk correlate directly with the rapidity and breadth of information access and the availability of appropriate communication channels. This article makes a start at showing how the media can democratize, illuminate and energize the response to the pandemic.