Publication: Nigeria - Towards the Improved Delivery of Social Services
Loading...
Published
1995-09
ISSN
Date
2012-08-13
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
Nigeria possesses a wealth of natural resources including major oil and gas deposits, a variety of solid minerals, good agricultural land, a well developed industrial base, an extensive banking system, a large labor force, and a vibrant private sector. However, the country's tremendous potential for growth and development has yet to be fulfilled. Real income and consumption per capita today are scarcely higher than they were in 1971 before the start of the oil boom. Social indicators have been improving somewhat but remain far acceptable levels. There is an urgent need to put in place, over the medium term, mechanisms that will ensure sustained improvements in the quality and quantity of social services.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Woo, Josephine. 1995. Nigeria - Towards the Improved Delivery of Social Services. Africa Region Findings & Good Practice Infobriefs; No. 47. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/9986 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Digital Object Identifier
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Human Development in Uganda : Meeting Challenges and Finding Solutions(Washington, DC, 2009-02)The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set ambitious targets for economic and social development, earmarking eight broad targets. Uganda appears to be on track to meet four of these goals by 2015: halving the poverty rate, eliminating gender disparities in primary school, halving the number of people without safe drinking water, and reversing the spread of AIDS. The country s performance is off track, however, in achieving substantial reduction in infant, child and maternal mortality, halving the number of people without access to sanitation facilities, eliminating gender disparities in secondary school, and achieving 100 percent primary school enrolment. This report seeks to identify challenges to improvement of human development outcomes, and to suggest ways of dealing with these challenges in order to improve service delivery, and therefore progress in human development indicators. It examines how well Uganda has moved toward achieving its PEAP targets for human development, focusing on three sectors: education, health care, and water and sanitation. The report argues that the key to improvement in social services - whether it be education, health care, or water and sanitation - is a new more efficient service delivery framework, a framework with improved links among the policymakers who shape broad goals, the providers of the services, and the customers who are the recipients.Publication Nicaragua Social Protection Public Expenditure Review(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-03-12)This review of public expenditures on Social Protection (SP) in Nicaragua is based on the analytical framework of Social Risk Management (SRM) developed by the World Bank. The concept of managing social risk comes from the notion that certain groups in society are vulnerable to unexpected shocks which threaten their livelihood and/or survival. Social protection focuses on the poor since they are more vulnerable to the risks and normally do not have the instruments to handle these risks. This prevents the poor from taking more risky activities that usually yield higher returns and that could help them overcome gradually their poverty situation. Social risk management involves policies and programs aimed at reducing key risks, breaking inter-generational cycle of poverty and vulnerability. Risk management consists in the choice of appropriate risk prevention, mitigation and coping strategies to minimize the adverse impact of social risks. Social protection under SRM is defined as public interventions to assist individuals, households and communities to better manage risk and provide support to the critically poor. Thus Social protection should provide: a safety net, particularly for the poor that are likely to fall in the cracks of established programs; and a springboard for the poor to bounce out of poverty.Publication Nicaragua - Poverty Assessment : Volume 3. Background Paper(Washington, DC, 2008-05)Nicaragua is a small, open economy that is vulnerable to external and natural shocks. With an estimated Gross National Income (GNI) per capita of US$1000 in 2006, and a total population of 5.2 million, it is one of the poorest countries in Latin America. Forty six percent of the population lived below the poverty line in 2005 (while 15 percent lived in extreme poverty), and the incidence of poverty is more than twice as high in rural areas (68 percent) than in urban areas (29 percent). Nicaragua's social indicators also rank among the lowest in the region, commensurate with its relatively low per capita income level. Nicaragua's long-term development vision is set out in its National Development Plan (NDP), 2005-2009, which gives greater importance to economic growth than the strategy document that preceded it. This also serves as its second Poverty Reduction Strategy (PRS). The goals of the PRS incorporate the MDGs, and establish medium (2006-2010) to long term targets (2015). By 2005, the country had made satisfactory progress on meeting the PRS/MDG targets for reducing extreme poverty, increasing net primary enrollment, and reducing infant and child mortality. This National Development Plan is being revised by the new government that took office on January 2007, which has expressed interest in maintaining policy continuity in those areas that have shown progress and tackling pending development challenges. These include efforts to improve the country's growth performance while reducing poverty, macroeconomic stability as a necessary, although not sufficient, condition to stimulate growth, and reduce poverty, a special focus on social issues that impact the poorest, including the MDGs, and environmental sustainability. Programmatic priorities for the new administration include a renewed focus on poverty reduction using a multi-sector approach, implementing pragmatic solutions to the energy crisis for the short to medium term; expanding water and sanitation services with environmentally sustainable solutions; sharing economic growth more broadly to tackle hunger, malnutrition and poverty; placing greater emphasis on preventive health and continuing social protection programs; extending illiteracy programs and improving education services, and pursuing municipal decentralization, state modernization, and good governance.Publication Tanzania : Early Childhood Development(Washington, DC, 2012-01)This report presents an analysis of the Early Childhood Development (ECD) programs and policies that affect young children in Tanzania. This report is part of a series of reports prepared by the World Bank using the Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER)-ECD framework and includes analysis of early learning, health, nutrition and social and child protection policies and interventions in Tanzania, along with regional and international comparisons. Tanzania is home to 7.6 million children age 0-6. Child and infant mortality have declined significantly in the last decade. SABER-ECD collects, analyzes and disseminates comprehensive information on ECD policies around the world. In each participating country, multi-sectoral information is collected on ECD policies and programs through a desk review of available government documents, data and literature, and extensive interviews with a range of ECD stakeholders, including government officials, service providers, civil society, development partners and scholars. The SABER-ECD framework presents a holistic and integrated assessment of how the overall policy environment in a country affects young children's development. SABER-ECD identifies three core policy goals that countries should address to ensure optimal ECD outcomes: establishing an enabling environment, implementing widely and monitoring and assuring quality. Improving ECD requires an integrated approach to address all three goals.Publication Maternal Health, Child Health and Nutrition in Lao PDR : Evidence from a Household Survey in Six Central and Southern Provinces(Washington, DC, 2013-06)Despite being on-track on the child- and maternal-health Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), Lao PDR continues to have some of the worst maternal and child health (MCH) and nutrition outcome indicators, both globally as well as in the East Asia and Pacific (EAP) region. This report presents results from a household, village, and facility survey on Maternal and Child Health (MCH) and nutrition in mostly rural areas of six central and southern provinces of Lao People's Democratic Republic (PDR). The information in this report localizes MCH and nutrition-related information that are typical for sampled catchment areas of selected health centers in six central and southern provinces of the country. In addition, the report summarizes data on service availability and readiness of health centers in terms of their ability to provide key MCH & nutrition-related services. The results from this survey thus shed light on what it would take to attain the health-related MDGs. In order to improve the level and equity of maternal and child health indicators, interventions would need to address numerous demand-side barriers, including physical access barriers, financial barriers, and cultural, linguistic, and educational barriers.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Understanding the Impact of Economic Shocks on Labor Market Outcomes in Developing Countries : An application to Indonesia and Mexico(2010-04-01)In this paper the authors use a search and matching model of multi-sector labor markets, to understand the channels through which economic shocks affect labor market outcomes in developing countries. In the model workers can be employed in agriculture, formal or informal urban jobs, or unemployed. Economic shocks are manifested as either increased turbulence in the formal/informal sectors or a decrease in overall sectoral productivity. By calibrating the model to Indonesia and Mexico, the authors are able to understand how the 1998 Indonesian crisis and the 2001 Mexican recession translated into labor market outcomes. They then venture to simulate how the current financial crisis might affect the allocation of labor and earnings across sectors, in these countries. The results suggest that in both countries past crises have increased the degree of turbulence of the formal sector, increasing job destruction. However, while in Indonesia the crisis affected the overall formal sector productivity, this was not the case in Mexico. This explains the larger blow to formal wages -- relative to the size of the shock- witnessed by Indonesian workers. The response of the informal sector was also different: In both countries the informal sector was able to act as a buffer, as relative earnings increased. However, while in Mexico it became much harder to find informal sector opportunities and easier to keep the job once found; in Indonesia turbulence in the informal sector increased substantially increasing the job destruction rate of informal jobs and limiting the cushioning role that the informal sector might have played. The agricultural sector was spared from the shock in both countries. In Indonesia, it actually benefited from an unusual exogenous increase in the price of rise. The simulations show that if either the informal or agricultural sectors are spared from the shocks, large reallocations of labor might occur, and the overall effect of the shock is smaller. Instead, if these sectors can t buffer the shock, the reallocation of labor is much smaller, but earnings in the formal sector drop substantially. The authors also explore the impact of alternative policies. They find that in relatively flexible markets where informality can be seen more as a choice rather than as queuing, unemployment benefits and informal employment subsidies may have paradoxical effects, by discouraging formal search. Instead, policies targeted at creating informal employment and boosting formal TFP growth have the desired effects.Publication Income Inequality and Violent Crime : Evidence from Mexico's Drug War(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-06)The relationship between income inequality and crime has attracted the interest of many researchers, but little convincing evidence exists on the causal effect of inequality on crime in developing countries. This paper estimates this effect in a unique context: Mexico's Drug War. The analysis takes advantage of a unique data set containing inequality and crime statistics for more than 2,000 Mexican municipalities covering a period of 20 years. Using an instrumental variable for inequality that tackles problems of reverse causality and omitted variable bias, this paper finds that an increment of one point in the Gini coefficient translates into an increase of more than 10 drug-related homicides per 100,000 inhabitants between 2006 and 2010. There are no significant effects before 2005. The fact that the effect was found during Mexico's Drug War and not before is likely because the cost of crime decreased with the proliferation of gangs (facilitating access to knowledge and logistics, lowering the marginal cost of criminal behavior), which, combined with rising inequality, increased the expected net benefit from criminal acts after 2005.Publication How to Move the Exchange Rate If You Must : The Diverse Practice of Foreign Exchange Intervention by Central Banks and a Proposal for Doing It Better(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-05)The paper is about the art of exchange rate management by central banks. It begins by reviewing the diversity of objectives and practices of central bank intervention in the foreign exchange market. Central banks typically exercise discretion in determining when and to what extent to intervene. Some central banks use publicly declared rules of intervention, with the aim of increasing visibility and strengthening the signaling channel of policy. There is tentative evidence that the volatility of foreign exchange reserves is comparatively lower in emerging market economies where central banks follow some form of rules-based foreign exchange intervention. The paper goes on to argue that when the foreign exchange market includes some large strategic participants, the central bank can achieve superior outcomes if intervention takes the form of a rule, or "schedule," indicating commitments to buying and selling different quantities of foreign currency conditional on the exchange rate. Exchange rate management and reserve management can then be treated as two independent objectives by the central bank. In line with the stylized facts reviewed, this would enable a central bank to pursue exchange rate objectives with minimum reserve changes, or achieve reserve targets with minimum impact on the exchange rate.Publication Digital Africa(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-03-13)All African countries need better and more jobs for their growing populations. "Digital Africa: Technological Transformation for Jobs" shows that broader use of productivity-enhancing, digital technologies by enterprises and households is imperative to generate such jobs, including for lower-skilled people. At the same time, it can support not only countries’ short-term objective of postpandemic economic recovery but also their vision of economic transformation with more inclusive growth. These outcomes are not automatic, however. Mobile internet availability has increased throughout the continent in recent years, but Africa’s uptake gap is the highest in the world. Areas with at least 3G mobile internet service now cover 84 percent of Africa’s population, but only 22 percent uses such services. And the average African business lags in the use of smartphones and computers as well as more sophisticated digital technologies that catalyze further productivity gains. Two issues explain the usage gap: affordability of these new technologies and willingness to use them. For the 40 percent of Africans below the extreme poverty line, mobile data plans alone would cost one-third of their incomes—in addition to the price of access devices, apps, and electricity. Data plans for small- and medium-size businesses are also more expensive than in other regions. Moreover, shortcomings in the quality of internet services—and in the supply of attractive, skills-appropriate apps that promote entrepreneurship and raise earnings—dampen people’s willingness to use them. For those countries already using these technologies, the development payoffs are significant. New empirical studies for this report add to the rapidly growing evidence that mobile internet availability directly raises enterprise productivity, increases jobs, and reduces poverty throughout Africa. To realize these and other benefits more widely, Africa’s countries must implement complementary and mutually reinforcing policies to strengthen both consumers’ ability to pay and willingness to use digital technologies. These interventions must prioritize productive use to generate large numbers of inclusive jobs in a region poised to benefit from a massive, youthful workforce—one projected to become the world’s largest by the end of this century.Publication Housing Finance and Inclusive Growth in Africa(Taylor and Francis, 2021-04)Using a panel database of 48 Sub-Saharan African countries from 2000 to 2012 that we partially constructed, this paper analyses the structure of housing finance in Africa, its determinants, and its impact on inclusive growth. We find that market capitalization and urbanization are key positive determinants of housing finance, while a post-conflict environment is conducive to greater housing finance development. This result suggests that housing finance is driven by standard market forces of demand and supply. Besides, we find that housing finance development in Africa is not yet an effective tool for reducing economic inequality, at its current, very earlier stage. However, we show that above a given threshold, housing finance could be efficient at reducing inequality. Finally, there is a slightly positive relationship between housing finance and greater economic development in Africa. All these findings suggest that policies to boost housing finance development in Africa would be fruitful in the medium to long terms.