This report addresses the issue of what publicly-supported programs and external assistance from the Bank and other agencies can do to accelerate attainment of targets such as reducing infant mortality by two-thirds. The evidence presented here relates to Bangladesh, a country which has made...

This evaluation assesses the development effectiveness of the World Bank's country-level HIV/AIDS assistance defined as policy dialogue, analytic work, and lending with the explicit objective of reducing the scope or impact of the AIDS epidemic. This is the first comprehensive evaluation of the...

This report analyzes the experience of Mauritania with the Poverty Reduction Strategy (PRS) process. The focus of the report is on evaluating the performance of the World Bank in supporting the PRSP initiative, not on appraising the authorities policies. The report covers the formulation and...

This OED report finds that the Bank has made progress on the environment, and notes that its commitments were not accompanied by precise goals and performance monitoring. It advances explanations of why things have turned out this way. It offers recommendations which focus on how to restore the...

The way countries finance health care influences how well a health system performs and achieves its expected outcomes, including how equitable and efficient it is. Countries decide how to mobilize revenues from different sources for financing health care, how to pool revenues in public and...

Over the past decade, faster growth and smarter social policy have reversed the trend in Latin America's poverty. Too slowly and insufficiently, but undeniably, the percentage of Latinos who are poor has at long last begun to fall. This has shifted the political and policy debates from poverty...

The report shows that there is good evidence that conditional cash transfers (CCTs) have improved the lives of poor people. Transfers generally have been well targeted to poor households, have raised consumption levels, and have reduced poverty, by a substantial amount in some countries....