The World Bank Open Knowledge Repository
The World Bank Open Knowledge Repository (OKR) is The World Bank’s official open access repository for its research outputs and knowledge products.
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Total publications: 38,614
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Publication Assessing Market Readiness for Private Investment in Solar Hybrid Mini Grids: A Promising New Approach for M300 Developed in Niger(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-03-26) World BankIn spring 2024, the World Bank Group and the African Development Bank launched an ambitious effort to connect 300 million people in Africa with electricity access by 2030. The subsequent M300 Africa Energy Summit held in January in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, was a landmark gathering focused on accelerating energy access across Africa. Renewable energy mini grids are expected to play a key role in this deployment. But for a scale-up commensurate with the need, governments—with support from donors—must create an enabling environment capable of attracting private investment and ensuring long-term sustainability. This Live Wire showcases a new approach for assessing mini grid market readiness. Developed in Niger, it could become a blueprint for the mini-grid work under M300. The recent work in Niger provides a comprehensive methodology for assessing a country’s readiness for private sector participation in mini-grid development. Using a 10-building-block framework, the study evaluated key technical, regulatory, financial, and institutional barriers to mini-grid deployment and proposed actionable solutions. The insights from this study offer a valuable model for other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, ensuring that the necessary technical, regulatory, and financial foundations are in place to scale mini grids effectively and support M300 goals.Publication Climate Risk and Poverty in the Middle East and North Africa(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-03-26) Balasubramanian, Chitra; Baquie, Sandra; Fuchs, AlanThe Middle East and North Africa faces significant climate challenges, such as increasing temperatures, heightened flood risks, frequent droughts, and growing air pollution issues. These challenges are compounded by the large proportion of the population living below the poverty line in some countries in the region. Indeed, people living in poverty are more exposed to poor air quality and natural disasters as they disproportionately tend to live in hazard-prone areas. They are also more vulnerable as they may have scarcer resources to cope with shocks. This paper combines remote sensing, geospatial data, and household surveys to provide high-resolution assessments of the exposure and vulnerability of the region’s population and poor people to four types of climate shocks. With the data available, the paper estimates that almost the entirety of the extreme poor population is exposed to at least one climate shock. The region hosts climate-poverty hot spots in the Republic of Yemen and Morocco, where adaptation to climate change will be crucial to end poverty. The resulting high-resolution estimates of exposure and vulnerability can inform the targeting of climate adaptation measures.Publication Rethinking Caribbean Tourism: Strategies for a More Sustainable Future(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-03-26) World BankThis report assesses the current performance of tourism in the Caribbean1 and, in light of the new trends, identifies future pathways and policies for sustainable growth in three targeted segments. These segments were selected to include the traditional markets of cruise and all-inclusive resort accommodation as well as new opportunities in the high-value segment of adventure tourism. Cruise and all-inclusive resorts continue to be priorities for governments as they provide jobs, stimulate foreign direct investment (FDI), and generate the majority of regional demand (WTTC, 2022) (CTO, 2020). However, influence and market power in these segments have also created environmental and social risks and inhibited tourism diversification. Adventure tourism offers potential to add value and diversity to the rich endowment of natural and cultural assets and expand the value proposition and local economic impact of traditional markets. Additionally, it can create a new ecosystem of suppliers appealing to an entirely different market segment of high-spending tourists. Segment selection was based on analysis of current impacts, growth projections, and scales of environmental and social externalities that examined the importance and value of the segments to the Caribbean. It also integrated feedback from consultations with key stakeholders and alignment with national policies and trends.Publication Knowledge, Data, and Information(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-03-26) World BankAfrica has significant potential to improve its climate-smart sustainable development by focusing on the Blue Economy. However, efforts to reach this potential are stymied by poor access to relevant data and knowledge due to inadequate historical investments in technology and institutional capacity for modernization. Today, many opportunities exist to leapfrog traditional development paths by leveraging a new range of technologies. BlueTech refers to the innovative use of emerging technologies to scale up the development impact of the Blue Economy, while managing associated trade-offs. These technologies can potentially accelerate the expansion of the Blue Economy, but only if African countries invest in enabling infrastructure, capacity, and services to strengthen their technological innovation ecosystem. A robust technological backbone will better harness the power of the cloud, e-package data, and technological knowledge to enable new ways to collect, analyze, and share data, making it more accessible and usable. At the same time, it will facilitate the collaborative development of harmonized systems to generate insights into and support decisions relating to the Blue Economy.Publication Climate Change and the Blue Economy in Africa(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-03-26) World BankClimate change impacts the planet overall, and the Blue Economy is not exempt from these effects. On the contrary, the ocean is a major regulator of global and regional weather, and ocean acidification is a fundamental influencer of coastal and marine ecosystems. Climate change is already affecting the Blue Economy in various ways. Sea-level rise is causing havoc on shorelines due to geomorphological processes. Changes in precipitation are causing floods and droughts in unpredictable patterns. Rising sea temperatures are starting to change patterns of ecosystem productivity, which will, in turn, reduce the availability of fish for human consumption. If climate change continues unchecked, extreme weather, such as storm surges, could conceivably combine with normal lunar tides to overwhelm the ability of coastal countries to safeguard their residents and infrastructure. Preparing for these outcomes by developing Africa’s Blue Economy could help reduce the potential impacts of climate change while improving the resilience and adaptation of the continent’s coastal communities.