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October 2012

What 4 Friends Learned in Tanzania About Getting Involved in a Community

Liviane Urquiza's picture

Available in Español, Français

YouThink! - Engage-toi ! Tirer les enseignements de l'engagement des jeunes en Tanzanie
An IFOP Survey (fr) published in 2010 reveals that in France, 30% of young people aged 15 to 24 do volunteer work. This is a good average when compared to the rest of Europe. But why be satisfied with 30% when all young French people have the wherewithal to contribute to the cause of their choice? What good is it for youth to be full of energy and bursting with ideas if others cannot benefit from it?

Heloise, Radia, Lea, and Julliette are students at Sciences Po Paris who looked for ways to encourage young people to get involved. How could they help others understand that everyone has an important part to play? That even if they are young, even if they do not yet have the right to vote, they still can make a difference?

And that’s how they came up with the idea to go on a trip.

Rising Tides Raise Some Boats More Than Others

Mabruk Kabir's picture

Like a Bollywood dance sequence, South Asia’s growth numbers tend to dazzle. It is the second-fastest-growing region in the world after East Asia. But behind the glamour lies a paradox. Despite robust economic growth, the total number of people living in poverty in South Asia has not fallen fast enough. Today, there are more poor people living under $1.25 a day in South Asia than in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Social indicators are lagging as well. South Asia has the highest rates of malnutrition in the world, with 250 million children undernourished. More than 30 million children still do not go to school. Gender discrimination remains a scar. Women’s labor-force participation in the region is among the world’s lowest, boys outnumber girls in school enrollment, and legal and judicial systems still do not address systemic gender violence.

Slowness in dealing with comments for the next 2 weeks

David McKenzie's picture

The World Bank's blogs have recently come under an increasing number of spam comments, despite spam filters which already sometimes I struggle to get through! A new system will be up November 16th I've been told, so we should be able to more quickly approve comments after then. Until then:

- if you have a genuine comment, send us an email to let us know it is in there - or just email it to one of us and we are happy to post it for you.

- we will continue to never approve a spam comment, so stop wasting your and our time spammers.

Shades of Green Cities

Yue Li's picture

Seoul, KoreaWhen it comes to urban development, “green” has become the buzzword. Among the public, “green” is often understood to be synonymous with reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In policymaking, “green” has much broader implications. It can range from preventing, treating, and abating pollution, to preserving and restoring environmental quality. It may simply be providing basic urban services which improve the cleanliness of streets. Apparently, there are different shades of “green” — we could define interventions targeting global public goods as dark green and those focusing more on local public goods as light green. Among them, what is the right one for South Asian cities?

Practitioners and government officials from the region had intensive discussions on this question throughout a recent workshop on urbanization in Korea, organized by the World Bank in collaboration with the Korea Research Institute for Human Settlements.

New journal: Migration and Development

Dilip Ratha's picture

It is a pleasure to receive the inaugural issue of a new journal Migration and Development published by Routledge. While many journals are publishing articles on migration and development and a few are exclusively dedicated to the topic of migration, this new journal has the potential to comprehensively introduce more development into the discussions of migration issues. The journal includes articles written bypolitical scientists, sociologists, anthropologists and economists - a welcome feature for policy makers and stakeholders. I also liked the fact that the first issue of the journal has articles on internal migration (in India) and on migration to the Gulf region - both these topics are important and yet relevant data are hard to come by.

India’s Informal Workers Form a ‘People’s Economy’

Renana Jhabvala's picture

Read this post in Español, Français, 中文

In recent years, we’ve seen sweeping change across the world’s economies; formal systems have broken down and become informal. My home region of South Asia is no exception: more than 90 percent of the workforce is made up of informal workers—street vendors, home-based workers, construction workers and smallholder farmers, many of whom aren’t certain of their incomes from week to week.

Can Non-State Service Delivery Undermine Governments?

Otaviano Canuto's picture

policeWhether it is in the U.S. presidential election campaign or as a result of the debt crisis in Europe, people on both sides of the Atlantic are debating the role of the state. Do we need more government or less of it? Do we want more public services provided by the state and funded with taxpayers’ money? Or are we better off with the private sector and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) doing the job?

Only 14% of Tanzanians have electricity. What can be done?

Isis Gaddis's picture

Let's think together: Every week the World Bank team in Tanzania wants to stimulate your thinking by sharing data from recent official surveys in Tanzania and ask you a couple of questions. This post is also published in the Tanzanian Newspaper The Citizen every Sunday.

Energy fuels economic development and the evidence is before our eyes every day.  Businesses require a steady supply of energy to produce goods and services.  Electricity allows school children to study after sunset and hospitals need it to save lives Insufficient or irregular energy supply is associated with significant economic cost for businesses and households.  Lack of access to clean energy also creates a myriad of health and environmental hazards, such as indoor pollution from cooking on traditional open-fire stoves and deforestation.

Unfortunately, affordable access to clean energy remains an elusive dream for most Tanzanians, especially those living outside of urban centers and the poor:

Media (R)evolutions: 43 Million Arab Users on Facebook

Kalliope Kokolis's picture

New developments and curiosities from a changing global media landscape: People, Spaces, Deliberation brings trends and events to your attention that illustrate that tomorrow's media environment will look very different from today's, and will have little resemblance to yesterday's.


 

For shared prosperity Tanzania needs a universal strategy

Jacques Morisset's picture

The figures don’t lie. Today, about 11 million Tanzanians live in poverty. This is too much. Equally worrisome is that since 2001 the national poverty rate appears to be stuck at approximately a third of the total population despite rapid and stable economic growth.

People need jobs

For a long time, the Tanzanian Government has defended itself: poverty reduction will catch up thanks to the massive public investment made in social and infrastructure sectors over the past decade. More children, including girls, are going to school, and the efforts to reduce infant mortality have registered spectacular achievements. However, it is estimated that those improvements will take one generation to translate into actual productivity gains and higher incomes.

Quote of the Week: Norman Davies

Sina Odugbemi's picture

“All political institutions will end sooner or later.  The question is when and how.  It’s our vanity that makes us think that what forms part of our world today must be stable and secure.”

Norman Davies. As quoted in the Financial Times, October 19, 2012. Lunch with the FT: Norman Davies, by Tony Barber.

Radical Openness at TED Global

Sanjay Pradhan's picture

This summer I was invited to speak at the TED Global conference in Edinburgh, Scotland on Open Development. As you might know, TED features "Ideas Worth Spreading" and this year's global conference focused on "Radical Openness." This was an opportunity to highlight how the traditional development paradigm is opening up in dramatic ways that allows us to achieve stronger development results. 

Today, many of us the world over are working to open up aid, increase transparency, empower citizens, and connect country practitioners to innovative solutions globally -- all of which moves us towards our goal of eradicating poverty. As per TED practice, this is interwoven with the evolution of my own thinking and experience as a development practitioner, since I was a student in India. I want to invite you to share your own innovations in Open Development.

How Can a Post-2015 Agreement Drive Real Change? Please Read and Comment on this Draft Paper

Duncan Green's picture

The post-2015 discussion on what should succeed the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is picking up steam, with barely a day going by without some new paper, consultation or high level meeting. So I, along with Stephen Hale and Matthew Lockwood, have decided to add to the growing slush-pile with a new discussion paper. We want you to read the draft (see right) and help us improve it. Contributions by 5 November please, either as comments on the blog, or emailed to research[at]oxfam.org.uk.

The paper argues that there’s an urgent need to bring power and politics into the centre of the post-2015 discussion. To have impact, any post-2015 arrangement has to take into account the lessons of over a decade of implementing the existing MDGs, and be shaped by the profound global change since the MDGs were debated over the course of the 1990s and early noughties.  We’re hoping that this will be at the centre of this week’s discussions in London linked to the High Level Panel and in Berlin at the Berlin Civil Society Center on Development post 2015.

Longreads: Women and Political Power, Developing Countries Turn to Each Other for Conservation, Skills Are the Test of Progress

Donna Barne's picture

Find a good longread on development? Tweet it to @worldbank with the hashtag #longreads.

The new Global Gender Gap Report by the World Economic Forum inspired tweets and stories all over the world, including this one in Bloomberg Businessweek highlighting the finding that women represent only 20% of elected officials.  Also check out the gender inequality data visualization in Slate.  Biodiversity and ecosystems popped up on Twitter during the UN biodiversity meeting in Hyderabad, India, in October. While developed countries doubled pledges for conservation, India also made headlines when it announced a $50 million grant to help developing countries preserve biodiversity. The move, along with other examples of recent conservation efforts by emerging countries, hints of a future in which larger developing economies “play a more active role in saving the environment – not just at home, but also abroad,” reports the New York Times blog, India Ink.  With global youth unemployment at critical levels, a new Education for All Global Monitoring Report finds that 20% of young people in developing countries don’t have enough education or skills for work.  Kwame Akyeampong, an Education for All senior policy analyst, looks at the situation for themost vulnerable and disadvantaged youth in his native Ghana in an Al Jazeera opinion piece.  Once available only to paid subscribers, academic research papers are now increasingly accessible through open access publishing, according to a story in The Guardian. “The exponential rise in open access publishing shows no sign of slowing down,” writes Stephen Curry, a professor of structural biology at Imperial College. 


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