C. Journal articles published externally
2,064 items available
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These are journal articles by World Bank authors published externally.
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
Games as Boundary Objects: Charting Trade-offs in Sustainable Livestock Transformation
(Taylor and Francis, 2020-03-27)Attempts to structurally transform segments of the agri-food system inevitably involve trade-offs between the priorities of actors with different incentives, perspectives and values. Trade-offs are context-specific, reflecting different socio-economic and political realities. We investigate the potential of structured boundary objects to facilitate exposing and reconciling these trade-offs within the context of multi-stakeholder social learning processes with pastoral and mixed crop-livestock communities in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia and Tanzania. Building on boundary objects as items flexible enough to be understood by all without having one common definition, structured boundary objects visualize actors’ input in a comparable format to facilitate knowledge sharing. Stakeholders in each country used a simulation tool and board game to explore the implications of changing livestock stocking and management practices for the environment and for actors’ future socio-economic priorities. Using structured boundary objects elicited trade-offs between household food and animal feed, and between livestock for income, labor, and/ or cultural functions, reflecting the context-specific and subjective evaluations actors make when attempting to plan livelihood changes. Our findings suggest to policy and decision-makers that sustainable transition plans can be developed when stakeholders in local agri-food systems employ approaches that allow shared understandings of trade-offs inherent to sustainable agriculture to emerge. -
Publication
Decomposing the Contribution of Migration to Poverty Reduction: Methodology and Application to Tanzania
(Taylor and Francis, 2019)In an economy with migration, poverty changes are composed of a number of forces, including the income gains and losses realized by the various migration streams. We present a simple but powerful decomposition methodology that uses panel data to measure the contributions of different migration streams to overall poverty change. An application to Tanzania shows the new insights that are provided – in particular on the role of migration to secondary towns in poverty reduction. -
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From Stumbling Block to Enabler: The Role of Public Financial Management in Health Service Delivery in Tanzania and Zambia
(Taylor and Francis, 2018-11-06)The way governments manage resources through the budget cycle has important implications for health policy and whether governments achieve societal objectives such as efficiency, equity, quality, and accountability. Studies found a positive association between health service delivery outcomes and good governance of public finance; however, the mechanisms through which public financial management affects service delivery remain underexplored. This article maps the three stages of the budget cycle to common performance criteria used in health service delivery. It applies this approach to experiences in Tanzania and Zambia. The findings point to a number of stumbling blocks, including the lack of flexibility to provide additional resources for unexpected demand for care, misalignment between budgeting and planning, fragmented funding sources, rigid internal controls, insufficient budget provision leading to arrears, and a budget evaluation system that is excessively compliance driven and gives inadequate attention to issues of equity, quality, and efficiency in service delivery. -
Publication
Progressive Pathway to Universal Health Coverage in Tanzania: A Call for Preferential Resource Allocation Targeting the Poor
(Taylor and Francis, 2018-10-31)Universal health coverage (UHC) can be a vehicle for improving equity, health outcomes, and financial well-being. After publication of the World Health Organization’s report in 2010, many countries declared their goal of achieving UHC. A key lesson from research evidence and country experience in implementation of pro-poor UHC is that public budget plays a crucial role in financing the poor. It has long been recognized that if a country wants to reduce the gap between the poor and non-poor, deprived groups should receive preferential allocation of health care resources to achieve more rapid improvements in their health. Based on a technical analysis of public funds allocation mechanisms in Tanzania, we argue that these mechanisms should prioritize the poor more explicitly and give them preferential treatment to close the gap with the non-poor in service utilization and health outcomes. -
Publication
Not Your Average Job: Measuring Farm Labor in Tanzania
(Elsevier, 2018-01)Understanding the constraints to agricultural growth in Africa relies on the accurate measurement of smallholder labor. Yet, serious weaknesses in these statistics persist. The extent of bias in smallholder labor data is examined by conducting a randomized survey experiment among farming households in rural Tanzania. Agricultural labor estimates obtained through weekly surveys are compared with the results of reporting in a single end-of-season recall survey. The findings show strong evidence of recall bias: people in traditional recall-style modules reported working up to four times as many hours per person-plot as those reporting labor on a weekly basis. Recall bias manifests both in the intensive and extensive margins of labor reporting: while hours are over-reported in recall, the number of people and plots active in agricultural work are under-reported. The evidence suggests that this recall bias is driven not only by failures in memory, but also by the mental burdens of reporting on highly variable agricultural work patterns to provide a typical estimate. All things equal, studies suffering from this bias would understate agricultural labor productivity. -
Publication
Roads and Rural Development in Sub-Saharan Africa
(Taylor and Francis, 2018)This paper assesses the relationship between access to markets and land cultivation in sub-Saharan Africa. Using a geo-referenced panel over four decades (1970–2010) during which the road network was significantly improved, we find a modest impact of improved market accessibility on local cropland expansion – especially in places that are exposed to better agricultural production conditions – as well as suggestive evidence of an increase in the local intensity of cultivation. Suggestive evidence of a positive association between improved market accessibility and local GDP growth beyond the impact of cropland expansion could reflect the stimulation of non-agricultural activities. -
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Prevalence, Economic Contribution, and Determinants of Trees on Farms across Sub-Saharan Africa
(Elsevier, 2017-11)Trees on farms are often overlooked in agricultural and natural resource research and policy in Sub-Saharan Africa. This article addresses this gap using data from the Living Standards Measurement Study-Integrated Surveys on Agriculture in five countries: Ethiopia, Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda. Trees on farms are widespread. On average, almost a third of rural smallholders grow trees. They account for an average of 17% of total annual gross income for tree-growing households and 6% for all rural households. Gender, land and labor endowments, and especially forest proximity and national context are key determinants of on-farm tree adoption and management. These new, national-scale insights on the prevalence, economic contribution and determinants of trees on farms in Africa lay the basis for exploring the interaction of agriculture, on-farm tree cultivation, and forestry to gain a more complete picture of the dynamics of rural livelihoods across the continent and beyond. -
Publication
Do Returns to Education Depend on How and Whom You Ask?
(Elsevier, 2017-10)Returns to education remain an important parameter of interest in economic analysis. A large literature estimates these returns, often carefully addressing issues such as selection into wage employment and endogeneity in terms of completed schooling. There has been much less exploration of whether the estimates of Mincerian returns depend on how information about wage work is collected. Relying on a survey experiment in Tanzania, this paper finds that estimates of the returns to education vary by questionnaire design, but not by whether the information on employment and wages is self-reported or collected by a proxy respondent. The differences derived from questionnaire type are substantial, varying from higher returns of 5 percentage points among the most well educated men to 16 percentage points among the least well educated women. These differences are at magnitudes similar to the bias in ordinary least squares estimation, which receives considerable attention in the literature. The findings demonstrate that survey design matters in the estimation of returns to schooling and that care is needed in comparing across contexts and over time, particularly if the data are generated through different surveys. -
Publication
Variation in Quality of Primary-Care Services in Kenya, Malawi, Namibia, Rwanda, Senegal, Uganda and the United Republic of Tanzania
(World Health Organization, 2017-06)Although substantial progress has been made in reducing child and maternal deaths in the past 15 years, many women and children in low- and middle-income countries continue to die of avertable causes. To stimulate a concerted effort to narrow the gap between rich and poor countries, the United Nation’s sustainable development goals (SDGs) include new targets to reduce maternal mortality to less than 70 per 100 000 live births and to reduce deaths of children younger than five years to 25 per 1000 live births by 2030. In this paper, we analyse the variation in the quality of processes of care in health facilities in seven countries in subSaharan Africa for two primary-care services: (i) antenatal care and (ii) care of sick children, using observations of clinical care, a gold standard measure of process quality. The results will inform policy-makers about current performance and provide a starting point for a broader discussion of quality measurement in the SDG era. -
Publication
Female Sex Workers Use Power Over Their Day-to-Day Lives to Meet the Condition of a Conditional Cash Transfer Intervention to Incentivize Safe Sex
(Elsevier, 2017-05)Female Sex Workers are a core population in the HIV epidemic, and interventions such as conditional cash transfers (CCTs), effective in other health domains, are a promising new approach to reduce the spread of HIV. Here we investigate how a population of Tanzanian female sex workers, though constrained in many ways, experience and use their power in the context of a CCT intervention that incentivizes safe sex. We analyzed 20 qualitative in-depth interviews with female sex workers enrolled in a randomized-controlled CCT program, the RESPECT II pilot, and found that while such women have limited choices, they do have substantial power over their work logistics that they leveraged to meet the conditions of the CCT and receive the cash award. It was through these decisions over work logistics, such as reducing the number of workdays and clients, that the CCT intervention had its greatest impact on modifying female sex workers’ behavior.