capacity building

Our infrastructure projects can help build many things—including stronger institutions

Working to finance major infrastructure projects, World Bank teams have seen time and again that the sustainability of investments depends ultimately on the efficiency and capacity of the agencies that manage them.

For that reason, our interventions often have a dual goal: supporting high quality infrastructure, and, at the same time, supporting institutions’ efforts to modernize and become more efficient. That institutional development sometimes comes in the form of stand-alone project components that focus on modernizing processes, governance, and skills. But in other cases, infrastructure investment projects can also provide opportunities to initiate important institutional changes.

This is often the case with civil works contracts, and the Tamil Nadu State Road Sector project in India is illustrative of how contracting strategies implemented with Bank support helped a highway agency enhance its implementation capacity, the efficiency of its expenditure, quality of infrastructure, and system sustainability through significantly improved asset management.

Logistics: Building skills to prepare for the jobs of tomorrow

As one of the key foundations for manufacturing, trade and growth, logistics is a strategic component of every economy. The sector can also contribute significantly to job creation. For example, in the UK, logistics is a $120billion industry that employs about 8% of the workforce. In India, it is a $160billion industry accounting for 22 million jobs, with employment growing 8% annually.

In 2016 and 2018, the World Bank’s Logistics Performance Index found that many developing countries face a significant skills gap in the logistics sector, especially at the managerial level. Similarly, several studies conducted in emerging economies such as China, India, and South Africa report shortages of supply chain talent.

In that context, emerging economies must tackle two critical challenges in order to develop a competitive logistics sector:

How can governments plug the skills gap in logistics?

How can the sector cope with the rapid changes brought about by technology, such as warehouse automation “freight uberization” or online platforms matching demand and supply, and their impact on the labor market?

Let’s look at three countries that consistently rank high in various global logistics rankings—Germany, the Netherlands, and Singapore—to see how they manage these challenges.

Data analytics for transport planning: five lessons from the field

When we think about what transport will look like in the future, one of the key things we know is that it will be filled and underpinned by data.

We constantly hear about the unlimited opportunities coming from the use of data. However, a looming question is yet to be answered: How do we sustainably go from data to planning? The goal of governments should not be to amass the largest amount of data, but rather “to turn data into information, and information into insight.” Those insights will help drive better planning and policy making.

Last year, as part of the Word Bank’s longstanding engagement on urban transport in Argentina, we started working with the Ministry of Transport’s Planning Department to tap the potential of data analytics for transport planning. The goal was to create a set of tools that could be deployed to collect and use data for improved transport planning.

In that context, we lead the development of a tool that derives origin-destination matrices from public transport smartcards, giving us new insight into the mobility patterns of Buenos Aires residents. The project also supported the creation of a smartphone application that collects high-resolution mobility data and can be used for citizen engagement through dynamic mobility surveys. This has helped to update the transport model in Buenos Aires city metropolitan area (AMBA).

Here are some of the lessons we learnt from that experience.

“Compressed demand”: How Uttar Pradesh is making sure rural sanitation subsidies for toilets go to the most needy

When the “Swachh Bharat Mission-Gramin” (SBM-G) was launched in October 2014 with the goal of making rural India free from open defecation by 2019, it gave states and districts more flexibility than previous national sanitation programs had. This led to a successful experiment in Uttar Pradesh called “demand compression”.

The state was preparing to use a tried-and-tested triggering process, where trained motivators concentrate their efforts on a community to help improve their understanding of safe sanitation and stimulate demand for toilets in rural communities where open defecation is still common. However, they faced a problem. If all the households that were eligible for government subsidies would actually claim them, funds would soon run out. With an estimated 15 million households across Uttar Pradesh without a toilet and eligible for a government subsidy of around $200, about $3 billion would be needed.

Household toilet constructed from own resources

In India, this transport engineer is racing toward the future… with German supercars

Harsh, a civil engineer from Surendranagar, the western State of Gujarat in India, proudly has a collection of supercars recently delivered from Germany. They are all brand new with sleek designs, glossy paint, and fully loaded with state-of-the-art features. One of them is a 600 horse-power monster, another is the first of its kind in India.

Without further ado, let's see what he has...

Supporting data for development: applications open for a new innovation fund

I’m pleased to announce that applications are now open for the second round of a new data innovation fund which was announced last month at the UN’s High Level Political Forum.

The fund will invest up to $2.5 million in Collaborative Data Innovations for Sustainable Development - ideas to improve the production, management and use of data in poor countries. This year the fund’s thematic areas are “Leave No One Behind” and the environment.

Details on eligibility, criteria and how to apply are here: bit.ly/wb-gpsdd-innovationfund-2017

The initiative is supported by the World Bank’s Trust Fund for Statistical Capacity Building (TFSCB) with financing from the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID), the Government of Korea and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade of Ireland. DFID is the largest contributor to the TFSCB.

Supporting statistics for development

Here in the World Bank’s Development Data group, we’re looking forward to working with the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data (GPSDD) again following a successful pilot round of innovation funding last year. But you might be asking - why is the World Bank’s Data team helping to run a data innovation fund?

Building Capacity vs. Building Capability: Why Development Needs ‘Systems Thinking’

This is the fifth post in a series of six in which Michael Woolcock, Lead Social Development Specialist at the World Bank and lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, discusses critical ideas within the field of Social Development.

Development is both an individual and collective endeavor. To be lifted out of poverty, people must attend school, stay healthy, live free of violence, and find rewarding employment— to name a few. Yet these achievements rely on the systems that provide these services and opportunities— the educational system, the healthcare system, the police and civil servants… the list goes on.

Systems, as many of us know, rely on a huge amount of human interaction. Every system relies on time being kept, progress and problems being reported, and rules being followed. This is why Michael Woolcock emphasizes that development could be more effective if it focused on building the capability of systems, not just the capacity of individuals.

In his mind, capacity building involves strengthening the individual ability of people to function or perform tasks. It therefore, focuses on skills training and improving technical ability among individuals. But people change, they move around, they leave. What is really needed for development to take hold are strong systems that can deliver services and weather storms. These complex systems underpin much of what people do and require learned collective skills, robust structures, rules that apply for everyone.

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Indigenous peoples, forest conservation and climate change: a decade of engagement

Women in Panama participated in activities supported by the capacity building program. Photo credit: World Bank

This year’s UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, which kicked off last week in New York, marks the 10^th anniversary of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

The World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF) is coming up on its own 10-year anniversary. Since 2008, the FCPF has run a capacity building program for forest-dependent indigenous peoples. The initiative, with a total budget of $11.5 million, has worked to provide forest-dependent indigenous peoples, national civil society organizations, and local communities with information, knowledge and awareness to increase their understanding of efforts to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+), and to engage more meaningfully in the implementation of REDD+ activities. The program recently wrapped up its first phase (2008-2016), which included 27 projects, and presented the results at a side event to the Permanent Forum.

Climate change is forcing us to reinvent rural transport for the better

India is in the midst of implementing PMGSY, a $35-billion national level Rural Road Program designed to provide basic road access to rural communities. The World Bank is supporting PMGSY through a series of lending operations ($1.8 billion in Bank funding) and significant knowledge support. A key element of the Bank’s support has been to integrate a “climate and green growth lens” into these efforts in cost-effective ways.

How is “green growth” benefiting India? One important dimension of that effort has been the use of environmentally optimized road designs, which has resulted in quality infrastructure using local and marginal materials, providing both economic and environmental benefits. Where available, sand deposits accumulated from frequent floods, industrial by-products, and certain types of plastic, mining, and construction waste have been used to good effect. Designs that use such materials have been about 25% cheaper to build, on average, than those requiring commonly used rock aggregates. The environmental benefits of using the above materials, in terms of addressing the big disposal problem of such materials and reducing the consumption of scarce natural stone aggregates, are as significant as the cost savings.

A second “green growth” dimension has been focusing investments on the “core” network, i.e. the network India needs to develop in order to provide access to all villages. Relative to a total rural road network of about 3.3 million kilometers, the core network that falls under PMGSY stretches over only 1.1 million kilometers. Prioritizing construction and maintenance on those critical road links will bring down costs as well as the associated carbon footprint.

2016: A unique opportunity to get it right on forests and climate change

Moniz Phu Khao Khouay, Vientiane Province — Forest monitoring efforts in Phu Khao Khouay, Vientiane Province, Laos PDR. Photo credit: Hannah McDonald

If ever there was a year to make significant progress on forest conservation and climate change, it was 2016. Coming on the heels of the historic COP21 Paris Agreement, 2016 was a year to demonstrate the commitment the World Bank Group has to support countries as they take forward their nationally determined contributions to address our global climate change challenge. It’s gratifying to look back on 2016 and feel that we contributed to harnessing this momentum and sense of urgency; especially in showing how sustainable land use, including sustainable forest management, is critical to achieving the ambitious targets set out in the Paris Agreement.

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