They are young, dynamic and solving problems in their community—Diepsloot township, a mixed formal and informal settlement of 139,000 people to the north of Johannesburg. These are some of the…

With the rising costs of out-of-pocket health care expenditures, currently estimated at half a trillion dollars globally, the number of people affected by this trend is expected to increase…

This blog post is part of a series for the 'Bureaucracy Lab', a World Bank initiative to better understand the world's public officials and explores a range of approaches to…

As part of the World Bank’s September 2019 global poverty update published a few weeks ago, metadata on the comparability of poverty estimates within countries over time was added to the PovcalNet…

Only three weeks after my arrival in South Africa, the country that is to be my home for the next three years, my team and I are in Tembisa, a township east of Johannesburg. Tembisa, where nearly…

Liberia strived to enhance the capacity of its national statistical system so it could track the progress of the country’s development. In making an effort to improve the capacity of its…

From farms to towns, women are a major provider of food and food security for their families, but women in half of the world still struggle to access their equal land and property rights in spite…

The development of many Southern African countries is inextricably linked to the mining sector. Yet the history of mining in Southern Africa, a region marked with high levels of inequality, is…

The effects of continuous and seemingly limitless expansion of urban areas are taking a toll on many, if not most, cities of Sub-Saharan Africa. This is particularly apparent in Tanzania’s…