Stylized facts set agendas and shape debates. In rapidly changing and data scarce environments, they also risk being ill-informed, outdated and misleading. So, following higher food prices since the 2008 world food crisis, robust economic growth and rapid urbanization, and climatic change, is...

Water has always been a source of risks and opportunities in the Middle East and North Africa. Yet rapidly changing socioeconomic, political, and environmental conditions make water security a different, and more urgent, challenge than ever before. This report shows that achieving water security...

Strengthening Post-Ebola Health Systems addresses the challenge of enabling the development of viable, resilient, and fiscally sustainable health system in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Initiated while Ebola was still raging in all of the three most-affected countries in West Africa, it...

This paper is the first joint country study conducted by the United Nations and the World Bank aimed at translating into practice the principles of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 2250, through direct and local engagement with young people and their communities in one of...

This book presents key activities, promising practices, and lessons learned to date from the World Bank’s Tuberculosis (TB) in the Mining Sector Initiative--an innovative multisectoral, multicountry, public-private regional initiative. It examines how a collaborative platform was established...

This paper describes the health financing policies used today by African countries to expand health coverage. It identifies key health financing policies used by African countries and measures the existence of regional patterns in the use of these policies. The paper does not attempt to identify...

In 2013, the Board of Executive Directors of the World Bank Group endorsed two ambitious goals: eliminating extreme poverty in the world by 2030 and boosting shared prosperity. The latter is defined as fostering the growth in the income of the poorest 40 percent of the population in each...

This research note investigates the impact of phone reminders on response rates in the context of a web-based survey in an international organization, the World Bank. After randomly assigning treatment to 248 survey participants, the study finds an intention-to-treat effect of 19.86 percentage...