This study presents empirical findings on drinking water supply in Ethiopia from a set of qualitative and quantitive surveys on rural public services. Access to safe drinking water is very low: 32% of the surveyed households use safe drinking water sources, and the average time to get to safe...

Drawing on a household survey collected in eight woredas in seven Ethiopian regions in 2009, as well as on qualitative fieldwork in four of the eight woredas, this paper provides analysis of agricultural extension delivery in Ethiopia. While overall extension services are relatively accessible...

"We examine access to, use of, and participation in decisions on improved water supply in the Volta basin of Ghana, one of the first countries to introduce a community-based approach to rural water supply on a large scale. While 71 percent of the households interviewed have access to improved...

"Even though both “good governance” and “pro-poor growth” have become important concepts in development thinking and practice, studies that assess to which extent and how good governance contributes to pro-poor growth are still relatively scarce. After reviewing the two concepts, this...

"Many developing countries are currently in the process of designing regulatory systems that should allow them to use genetically modified organisms (GMOs) for agricultural development, while also managing the food safety and environmental risks potentially associated with these technologies....

"Participatory approaches are an increasingly prominent technique for designing agricultural strategies within Sub-Saharan Africa. However, such approaches are frequently criticized for either not involving enough stakeholders or limiting the scope of their participation. By analyzing the role...

"Decentralization has the potential to improve the accountability of government and lead to a more efficient provision of public services. However, accountability requires broad groups of people to participate in local government. Thus, voter turnout at local government elections is an important...

"In 1993, India introduced quota-based political reservations for women in rural areas with the objective to promote gender equality in human development by making rural service provision and local governance inclusive and responsive to the needs of women. Recent evidence shows that reservation...

Large-scale social safety net programs such as Indias National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) are difficult to implement due to governance challenges related to elite capture, leakages, and corruption. The ability to identify how the governance challenges of program implementation can be...