Tanzania

Cash transfers and health: It matters when you measure, and it matters how many health care workers are around to provide services

This post was co-authored with Katrina Kosec of IFPRI.

A whirlwind, surely incomplete tour of cash transfer impacts on health
Your run-of-the-mill conditional cash transfer (CCT) program has significant impacts on health-seeking behavior. Specifically, there are conditions (or co-responsibilities, if you prefer) that children get to school and/or that they get vaccinated or have some wellness visits. While the school enrollment effects are well established, the effects on both health seeking behavior and on health outcomes have been much more mixed. CCTs have led to better child nutritional status and improved child cognitive development in Nicaragua, better nutritional outcomes for a subset of children in Colombia, and had no impacts for child health in studies on Brazil and Honduras. CCTs conditioned only on school enrollment did not lower HIV infections among adolescent girls in South Africa; and in Indonesia CCTs increased health visits but did not translate into measurably improved health. Unconditional cash transfer programs have also had mixed results on health, with better mental health and food consumption in Kenya, better anthropometric outcomes for girls (not boys) in South Africa, no average impacts (although some for the poorest quarter) on child outcomes in Ecuador, and no average impacts on maternal health care utilization in Zambia (albeit yes effects for women with better access to such services).

Opening up a world of data for resilience: A global effort to help access and use countries’ disaster risk information

As a country that is particularly vulnerable to flooding, Malawians know that they cannot halt the forces of nature, but they can prepare and plan for their impacts – and they did. Supported by the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) and the World Bank, the Government of Malawi undertook a series of community mapping activities in which it collected data about the environment for a flood risk modeling exercise and other preparedness activities. So in January 2015, when Malawi experienced its most devastating flood in a century, the data that its government collected was used to support recovery activities.

Robust and actionable information like this can help those at risk understand and prepare for hazards, saving lives and assets. However, even in this era of big data and hyper-connectivity, when one would think that every place on earth is already mapped in great detail, such information is often inaccessible, disparate, or altogether nonexistent. Even as recently as this month’s earthquake on the border of Tanzania and Uganda, people still scrambled for spatial information. Doing so in the moments after a disaster, though, is too late.

On the road to sustainable growth: measuring access for rural populations

This is part of a series of blogs focused on the Sustainable Development Goals and data from the 2016 Edition of World Development Indicators. This blog draws on data from the World Bank’s Rural Access Index and on results presented in the report Measuring Rural Access: using new technologies

In Nepal, 54 percent of the rural population lives within 2 kilometers of an all season road.

Just over half of the rural population in Nepal lives within 2 kilometers of a road in good or fair condition as measured by the Rural Access Index (RAI) in 2015, leaving around 10.3 million rural residents without easy access. The map shows how the RAI varies across the country: in the southern lowlands, where both road and population density are high, the RAI is around 80 percent in some districts. In the more rugged northern regions, lower road density and poor road quality leave many disconnected, resulting in a low RAI figure – in many places less than 20 percent.

Fighting Deforestation in the Miombo Woodlands of Southern Africa

Miombo trees in the Reserva Nacional do Gilé, Zambézia Province. Photo by Andrea Borgarello for the World Bank

Well-regulated financial technology boosts inclusion, fights cyber crime

Luceildes Fernandes Maciel is a beneficiary of the Bolsa Família program in Brazil. © Sergio Amaral/Ministério do Desenvolvimento Social e Agrário

Financial technology — or FinTech — is changing the financial sector on a global scale. It is also enabling the expansion of financial services to low-income families who have been unable to afford or access them. The possibilities and impact are vast, as is the potential to improve lives in developing countries.

The financial sector is beginning to operate differently; there are new ways to collect, process, and use information, which is the main currency in this sector. A completely new set of players is entering the business. All areas of finance — including payments and infrastructure, consumer and SME credit, and insurance — are thus changing.

Tanzania: How boosting work skills through education can lead to economic diversification

For Tanzania, a predominantly rural economy striving to achieve middle-income status by 2025, a major challenge is to create employment for 800,000 youth entering the labor market each year.

Can recycled 3D printing filament lead to a successful social venture?

*3D printing filament from PET plastic, ReFabDar*

The World Bank recently launched the ReFabDar initiative together with COSTECH and the Ethical Filament Foundation to test the opportunity of turning Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic waste into value through collaboration across the recycling industry, local innovators and entrepreneurs, makers and tinkerers, and by leveraging 3D printers and new, low-cost PET extruder technology. PET is the most common thermoplastic polymer resin of the polyester family used in fibers for clothing, containers, and other products.

The initiative, funded by the IC4D Trust Fund at the World Bank and launched last September, aimed to assess the feasibility and the market opportunity to turn PET plastic waste into 3D printer filament that can be sold locally or globally, and to then print unique and local marketable products, which could be then traded and sold by waste collectors back to their communities. It also aims to build local capacity on making and digital fabrication in countries like Tanzania. More background on the initiative can be found here.

Getting current: New tech giving more Africans access to electricity

Much work remains to be done to ensure reliable electricity access for Africa's citizens. A number of complications are making it difficult to achieve this UN Sustainable Development Goal. Yet access rates are expanding in many nations, and technology and design improvements offer opportunities to make rapid leaps forward.

And while the World Bank’s Global Tracking Framework shows progress is being made to deliver electricity to those without, most of it is taking place in Asia. In Africa, it’s a different story.

African countries come together to address gaps in managing digital information for open government

While 85 percent of participating OGP countries have digitized their public records, only 16 percent are storing them in secure, professionally managed digital repositories.

On April 22 and April 29, 2016 representatives from Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Sierre Leone, South Africa, and Tanzania came together in a virtual South-South Knowledge exchange hosted by the World Bank in collaboration with the Open Government Partnership to discuss an issue of mounting concern: managing records and information to support open government. These countries – committed to the goal of open government, and a number with new right to information laws and open data initiatives - were motivated by increasing recognition that their commitments to make information open cannot be fully realized until they increase their capacity to manage records and information, especially the growing amount of information in digital form.

African women help their communities go solar

Also available in: Arabic | Spanish

*Wamayo’s solar lantern has helped her tailoring business grow.*

This number cannot be emphasized enough – more than 1 billion people around the world live without access to electricity, and 2.9 billion still cook with polluting, harmful fuel like firewood and dung.

As we celebrate Earth Day, we're looking at the ways to bring energy access to those communities and transform lives, and at the same time, protect our planet’s resources. How can we make sure that the right progress for communities is the right progress for the planet?

The good news is that the world is constantly coming up with new technology to address this challenge. We have portable, phone-charging solar lamps and energy efficient cookstoves that are affordable and practical for communities living off-the-grid. The challenge now is how to make sure the right technologies are available in affordable and sustainable ways to the communities that need them most.

Solar Sister is a social enterprise that recruits, trains, and supports African women launch clean-energy businesses in their communities, selling lights and cookstoves to their neighbors. We are organized around the principle that women must be intentionally included in discussions around energy.

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