World Bank Blogs |

To achieve #Housing4All, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater

Mexico City. Photo by VV Ninci via Flickr CC

In a world divided over how to deal with such serious problems as terrorism, immigration, free trade, and climate change, governments agree on the urgency of solving what is arguably the biggest problem of all: supplying safe, well-located, and affordable housing for the billions of people who need it.

There is even agreement on the basic steps to that goal: improving land management and adopting more tenure-neutral policies.

There is also consensus on the fact that government alone cannot afford to pay the bill. According to McKinsey & Co., the annual price tag for filling the “global housing gap” ($1.6 trillion) is twice the cost of the global investments needed in public infrastructure to keep pace with GDP growth.

As we approach the 60th anniversary in 2018 of the declaration of housing as a “universal human right,” it’s time for governments to turn to an obvious solution for closing the housing gap that they continue to ignore only at their peril: long-term market finance. Without a substantial increase in private capital, the housing gap will continue to increase, and so will the odds of social discontent.

Connecting on climate action and Sustainable Development Goals

Global action on climate change to help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals was a key message delivered by the Italian Ministry of the Environment, Land and Sea at the United Nations High Level Political Forum in New York. All4TheGreen, the Ministry’s collaboration with the Connect4Climate program of the World Bank Group, was presented as an important case-study to encourage citizen engagement to achieve a sustainable future. All4TheGreen was a week of more than 80 events in the lead-up to the recent G7 Environment minister’s meetings in the cultural and academic hub of Bologna, Italy.

Weekly links July 21: a 1930s RCT revisited, brain development in poor infants, Indonesian status cards, and more…

Martin Kanz summarizes his new paper on understanding the demand for status good consumption based on credit card experiments in Indonesia on Let’s Talk Development – including discussion of an intervention that temporarily boosts self-esteem, and showing that this lowers the demand for status goods.
Nature news on how brain imaging technology is being used to measure how poverty affects brain development of infants in Bangladesh – differences in grey matter already seen at 2-3 months of age!
Want to check out what’s going on across many fields in economics? The program and papers from the NBER Summer Institute is a great place to see what’s new.

Tags:
development impact links

Weekly wire: The global forum

These are some of the views and reports relevant to our readers that caught our attention this week.

The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2017
United Nations
The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2017 reviews progress made towards the 17 Goals in the second year of implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The report is based on the latest available data. It highlights both gains and challenges as the international community moves towards full realization of the ambitions and principles espoused in the 2030 Agenda. While considerable progress has been made over the past decade across all areas of development, the pace of progress observed in previous years is insufficient to fully meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and targets by 2030. Time is therefore of the essence. Moreover, as the following pages show, progress has not always been equitable. Advancements have been uneven across regions, between the sexes, and among people of different ages, wealth and locales, including urban and rural dwellers. Faster and more inclusive progress is needed to accomplish the bold vision articulated in the 2030 Agenda.

2017 Change Readiness Index
KPMG
The 2017 Change Readiness Index (CRI) indicates the capability of a country – its government, private and public enterprises, people and wider civil society – to anticipate, prepare for, manage, and respond to a wide range of change drivers, proactively cultivating the resulting opportunities and mitigating potential negative impacts. Examples of change include:

• shocks such as financial and social instability and natural disasters
• political and economic opportunities and risks such as technology, competition, and changes in government.

Since 2012, the CRI has evolved to become a key tool that provides reliable, independent, and robust information to support the work of governments, civil society institutions, businesses, and the international development community.

The Nigerian girl on my mind

Children from Gwoza, an area within Borno State, North East, Nigeria. Photo by: Nabil Shaiban/World Bank

Her tears remain vivid in my mind. She was one of so many young Nigerian kids that we met while on mission in North East Nigeria. They and the rest of their communities were desperate for hope and livelihood. I was part of a World Bank inter-disciplinary crisis response/stabilization and operational support team that recently visited the region, which remains the home base for the Boko Haram insurgency.

In Liberia, providing comfort for kids in the aftermath of the Ebola crisis

The Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) crisis ended more than a year ago in Liberia. It resulted in over 10,000 cases and 5,000 deaths. For many children, the crisis continues through intrusive memories of illness, isolation, and death. These memories are particularly acute for the children directly affected by Ebola; those that were quarantined, separated from family during treatment, or orphaned. The Liberia Ministry of Health (MOH) identified 3,091 such children, and a World Bank working paper calculated that approximately 4,200 Liberian children lost one or both parents to Ebola.

Putting women’s health and empowerment at the center of development

Registered nurses look after newborns at a maternity hospital in Freetown Sierra Leone. © Dominic Chavez/World Bank

Last week on World Population Day, I was thinking of the joy of children and the right of women to decide when to have them. It matters to women, but it matters to society as a whole. There can be no sustainable development without women’s empowerment, and there can be no women’s empowerment without access to comprehensive maternal and reproductive health services. Family planning is part of them.

Declining private investment in infrastructure – a trend or an outlier?

We’ve just released the 2016 update for the World Bank’s Private Participation in Infrastructure (PPI) Database and it makes for some gloomy reading. Investment commitments (investments) in infrastructure with private participation in Emerging Markets and Developing Economies (EMDEs) fell by a whopping 37% compared to 2015.

Connecting Palestinian cities for a more sustainable future

Cities expand in the blink of an eye, and with such rapid growth come corresponding issues. This is immediately apparent when you drive through a Palestinian city and observe the severe traffic problems. While such gridlock may be inconvenient for a person caught in it, it can be a severely damaging for many small business owners, whose shops become inaccessible due to the traffic build-up.

What a new preschool study tells us about early child education – and about impact evaluation

When I talk to people about impact evaluation results, I often get two reactions:

Sure, that intervention delivered great results in a well-managed pilot. But it doesn’t tell us anything about whether it would work at a larger scale.
Does this result really surprise you? (With both positive results and null results, I often hear, Didn’t we already know that intuitively?)

A recent paper – “Cognitive science in the field: A preschool intervention durably enhances intuitive but not formal mathematics” – by Dillon et al., provides answers to both of these, as well as giving new insights into the design of effective early child education.

Pages