Middle East and North Africa

Solving the water crisis in Beirut

In many ways, Beirut is the capital of resilience and generosity. Over the centuries, the city has embraced, and continues to embrace, civilizations and cultures of diverse backgrounds and colors, and today, it stands as resilient as ever in the face of subsequent protracted crises in its neighborhood.

Despite all of their natural advantages, though, residents of Beirut are sorely lacking in one basic ingredient of life – water. Beirut’s roads attest to this reality, as they often get clogged with water tanks, whose roaring engines provide a backdrop to the sounds of the city. Lebanon’s severe water shortage affects 1.6 million people in Beirut and the Mount Lebanon area, but especially the poorest neighborhoods of the city where 460,000 residents living on less than $4 a day have to make do with only a few hours of drinking water each day. In some parts of the city, that can be as low as three hours a day in summertime, the peak of the crisis.

Women and migration: Exploring the data

International Migrants Day is a call to disseminate information on international migration and look toward further understanding its intersection with economic growth and socioeconomic wellbeing. Here we draw on data from the World Bank Gender Data Portal to highlight four big facts about women AND international migration. We focus on the “international migrant stock” which is the number of people born in a country other than that in which they live. Women, men, boys and girls experience migration differently. Accurate and timely sex-disaggregated data on international migration is critical for uncovering the specific needs and vulnerabilities of women and men and for shaping migration policy.

Globally, women are on the move: they comprise slightly less than half of all international, global migrants. In fact, the share of women among global, international migrants has only fallen slightly during the last three decades, from 49 percent in 1990 to 47 percent in 2017.

Managing urban forced displacement to build resilient communities

Globally, around 68.5 million people have fled their homes from conflict or persecution either as refugees, internally displaced persons, or asylum seekers. Contrary to what some may think, most of the displaced people don’t live in camps. In fact, it’s estimated that about 60%–80% of the world’s forcibly displaced population lives in urban areas.

The “urban story” of forced displacement is often compounded by its hidden nature. Compared to those displaced in camps, it is more difficult to track the living conditions of those displaced in urban areas, obtain precise numbers, and many are not recipients of humanitarian assistance.

Digitizing to succeed in MENA

The Middle East and North Africa region have some of the best educated, unemployed people in the world. High-skill university graduates currently make up almost 30 percent of the unemployed pool of labor in MENA, many of them women. In Tunisia, slightly more than half of the working age population is out of work, the vast majority being women. Part of the problem is that, despite some economic growth, not enough new jobs are being created.

A WASH response to Yemen’s cholera outbreak

Editor's Note:
The global water crisis is a crisis of too much, too polluted and too little. At the World Bank, our job is to find and implement solutions to tackle this crisis. In the “Water Solutions” blog series, you’ll read about World Bank-supported projects in different countries which demonstrated solutions to the world’s most pressing water issues, to fulfill our vision for a water-secure world.

Since 2015, when armed conflict began, Yemen's water and sanitation infrastructure has suffered significant damages. Direct attacks on the infrastructure have been exacerbated by the lack of energy (electricity and fuel), spare parts, operation and maintenance funds, and three years of unpaid salaries of civil servant staff. This confluence of factors has undermined the robustness of water and sanitation systems in Yemen and contributed to the worst cholera outbreak in history. According to the World Health Organization, as of November 11, 2018, 1,300,495 suspected cholera cases and 2,609 deaths have been reported.

The upsurge of cholera cases is attributed to several risk factors, including a disruption of basic water and sanitation services, contaminated water sources in affected communities, an inability to treat sewage due to non-functional wastewater treatment plants, and the absence of garbage collection systems. More than 70 percent of the population (22 million people) requires assistance to access safe drinking water and sanitation. Basic water supply, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) infrastructure is on the verge of total collapse, and many internally displaced persons (IDPs) are at a particularly high risk, due to overcrowded shelters and settlements with inadequate water and sanitation facilities.

Shared Prosperity: A challenging but important goal to monitor

Shared prosperity is one of the World Bank Group’s Twin Goals, introduced in 2013. Progress toward this goal is monitored through an indicator that measures the annualized growth rate in average household per capita income or consumption among the poorest 40 percent of the population in each country (the bottom 40), where the bottom 40 are determined by their rank in household per capita income or consumption. Chapter 2 of the 2018 Poverty & Shared Prosperity Report provides an update on the recent mixed progress on shared prosperity around the world in about 2010-15.

The shared prosperity indicator was proposed as a means to shine a constant light on the poorest segments of the population in every country, irrespective of their level of development. Shared prosperity has no target or finish line, because the aim is to continuously improve well-being. In good times and in bad, in low and high-income economies alike, the bottom 40 percent of the population in each nation would be monitored. Tracking the bottom 40’s absolute growth as well as their growth relative to the mean is a way to remind us to always consider distributional impacts and strive for equitable outcomes.

An important but challenging goal to monitor

Despite its importance and universal relevance, shared prosperity is more challenging to monitor than global poverty. While one household survey is sufficient to calculate poverty, shared prosperity measurement requires two recent comparable surveys.

The implication of this stronger data requirement is that 91 out of the 164 economies with an international poverty rate measured in PovcalNet are included in the 6^th edition of the Global Database of Shared Prosperity (GDSP).

Finding gender-based violence solutions in humanitarian settings

Every day, more than 44,000 people are forced to flee their homes because of conflict and persecution. Forced displacement increases the risks of gender-based violence (GBV), especially intimate partner violence. In some humanitarian settings, sexual violence—by both partners and non-partners—is also exacerbated.

Girls’ mobility is often restricted, and rates of child marriage may increase. Women and girls can experience violence at every stage of their journeys, including at camps, transit countries, when they reach their destinations, and when they return home to a war-ravaged setting.

Despite these challenges, to date there has been very little research to identify effective interventions to prevent and address GBV in humanitarian settings.

Scaling the use of Islamic finance for infrastructure: MDBs can help

Sara Ahmed and Ashraf Bouajina's picture

Using Islamic finance for infrastructure development attracted more attention recently in the quest to maximize finance for development.

At the recent World Bank-IMF Annual Meetings in Bali, the World Bank and the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB) co-hosted a symposium on Islamic infrastructure finance, building on the institutions’ strategic partnership. As we note in Mobilizing Islamic Finance for Infrastructure Public-Private Partnerships, the asset-backed, ring-fenced, and project-specific nature of Islamic finance structures and their emphasis on sharing risks make them a natural fit for infrastructure public-private partnerships (PPPs).

Accelerated remittances growth to low- and middle-income countries in 2018

On the back of stronger growth in remittance-sending economies, remittance flows to low- and middle-income countries are expected to reach a new record of $528 billion in 2018, an increase of 10.8 percent from last year, according to the World Bank’s Migration and Development Brief released today.

The jobs train now departing from platform ...

We have been living with digital platforms for about a decade now and their impact on changing how we work is beginning to make itself felt. Even so, it merits much greater attention and investigation, but until now the spotlight has been trained firmly on robots and automation.

Middle East and North Africa

An important but challenging goal to monitor

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