Thanks to Open Access (OA), scientists, health care professionals, libraries, and institutions facing budget limitations can access scholarly publications at little or no cost. Claire Guimbert,Research Librarian in ITS Knowledge and Information has gathered just a few of the many resources from outside the World Bank that our library staff has found helpful:
Journals:
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ): www.doaj.org
Meet Ibrahim, 27, a 2015 Agronomy graduate from Tanzania’s Sokoine University of Agriculture, one of the leading agricultural colleges in Sub-Saharan Africa. You would expect him to be dressed in blue overalls, working on one of the largest plantations near Arusha, in Basutu or Ngarenairobi, where they grow barley and wheat.
In our continuing blog series leading up to International Open Access Week (October 23-27), Eduardo E. Quintero Orta, Research Librarian in ITS Knowledge and Information* discusses the importance and prevalence of Open Access to research in Latin America:
Agriculture is the backbone of many African economies, employing the most citizens in most countries, citizens who produce food for consumption and raw materials for industries. With the current data revolution, and the explosion of new data sources available in Tanzania, we can push for the integrated use of mechanization, fertilizers, and digital technologies to get more efficiency and productivity in our agriculture.
Public exhibition at Gerezani BRT Station in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania on October 12, 2017.
(Photo: World Bank)
Many urban planners may know the success stories of Curitiba, Singapore or London realizing transit-oriented development (TOD). However, TOD is still very new in Sub-Saharan Africa. Although this concept of leveraging on major transit infrastructure to affect integrated land-use development for greater benefits may be gaining more recognition, there are few examples of successful TOD in Sub-Saharan Africa beyond a couple of South African cities, such as Cape Town and Johannesburg.
Dar es Salaam, the largest city in Tanzania with a population of 4.6 million, is expected to become a mega city by 2030 with a population over 10 million. However, its growth has been largely shaped by informality, coupled with a lack of hierarchy in roads and transit modes. It is increasingly difficult to get around the city without being stuck in traffic for hours. The complex and fragmented institutional structure of Dar es Salaam compounds the challenges, making management of the city complicated and less effective.
NYTimes piece on when the revolution came for Amy Cuddy about how the replicability crisis came to psychology, but also about the issues surrounding online critiques: “subjectivity — had burrowed its way into the field’s methodology more deeply than had been recognized. Typically, when researchers analyzed data, they were free to make various decisions, based on their judgment, about what data to maintain: whether it was wise, for example, to include experimental subjects whose results were really unusual or whether to exclude them; to add subjects to the sample or exclude additional subjects because of some experimental glitch. More often than not, those decisions — always seemingly justified as a way of eliminating noise — conveniently strengthened the findings’ results….Everyone knew it was wrong, but they thought it was wrong the way it’s wrong to jaywalk,” Simmons recently wrote in a paper taking stock of the field. “We decided to write ‘False-Positive Psychology’ when simulations revealed it was wrong the way it’s wrong to rob a bank”
The World Bank is committed to transparency and accountability and welcomes opportunities to explain its work to the widest audience possible. Openness promotes engagement with stakeholders, which in turn, improves the design and implementation of projects and policies, and strengthens development outcomes.
“Tell me where you live, and I can predict how well you’ll do in life.”
Does welfare vary largely across space?
Although I don’t have a crystal ball, I do know for a fact that location is an excellent predictor of one’s welfare. Indeed, a child born in Togo today is expected to live nearly 20 years less than a child born in the United States. Moreover, this child will earn a tiny fraction—less than 3%—of what his or her American counterpart will earn.
Asking how migrants themselves see the difference may further help understand why they often move to towns, while the income levels and amenities are higher in the cities. (Photo: Hendri Lombard / World Bank)
In our previous post, we explored how migration from rural to urban areas is not a one-step move, but rather a dynamic live-long process that expands and modifies migrants’ action space and opportunities to improve their life conditions, and how the attraction of secondary towns could be partly understood within this framework because of their role as “action space” enhancers.
Yet, defining precisely what constitutes a town or a city is tricky, to the point that Wittgenstein found it even a useful analogy with which to demonstrate definitional conundrums more broadly. “And how many houses or streets does it take for a town to be a town?”, he rhetorically asks his readers, while discussing at what point a language should be considered complete in his Philosophical Investigations.
At the same time, the distinction between towns and cities is intuitively unambiguous to most non-experts. Asking how migrants themselves see the difference may further help understand why they often move to towns, while the income levels and amenities are higher in the cities. According to the conversations we had with 75 migrants from rural Kagera, Tanzania, three dimensions stand out: vibrancy, monetization and anonymity.
