Mexico

Scaling up innovations in agriculture: Lessons from Africa

The West Africa Agricultural Productivity Program is building a sustainable and nutritious food system in Nigeria that creates jobs for youth. Photo: Dasan Bobo/World Bank

For too long the narrative surrounding Africa’s agri-food sector has been one of limited opportunity, flat yields and small farms. It’s true that Africa is still producing too little food and value-added products despite recent efforts to increase investment, and that agricultural productivity has been broadly stagnant since the 1980s as shown in the 2018 African Agriculture Status Report.

Confronting tobacco illicit trade: a global review of country experiences

Illicit trade in tobacco products undermines global tobacco prevention and control interventions, particularly with respect to tobacco tax policy. From a public health perspective, illicit trade weakens the effect of tobacco excise taxes on tobacco consumption - and consequently on preventable morbidity and mortality - by increasing the affordability, attractiveness, and/or availability of tobacco products. Furthermore, tobacco illicit trade often depends on and can contribute to weakened governance.

The key to resilient housing lies in the fine print

Image: World Bank

From Canada to Kenya, nearly every country struggles to provide housing for all its residents. It’s a goal that has become a moving target: Migration – both rural-to-urban and cross-border – is placing mounting pressure on cities to house their newcomers.

Three million people move to urban areas every week, and by 2030, three billion more people will need quality housing. The growing risks of climate change demand housing strategies that focus not only on affordability, but also on resilience.

As markets change fast, governments must be ever vigilant that policies don’t become obsolescent or even harmful because their details have become out of date. Even well-designed housing programs require adjustments.

How do we help cities breathe better? Introducing the Clean Bus Project

Buses, cyclist, and car traffic in Santiago de Chile. Photo: Claudio Olivares Medina/Flickr

Earlier this month, Santiago de Chile took delivery of 100 brand-new electric buses. The event was a first in the region, and impressive images of the state-of-the-art buses driving in convoy toward their new home in Chile’s capital city were shared by global media. These buses are part of a broader effort to tackle smog and revolutionize the city’s public transport system. By 2022, Chile aims to increase the number of electric vehicles in the country tenfold, which would put it in the vanguard of clean mobility in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), and amongst developing countries worldwide. These changes are expected to help the country meet its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) target, set in the wake of the Paris Agreement on climate change. The target calls for a 30% reduction in GHG emissions per unit of GDP by 2030, with transportation being one of the main sectors for mitigation.

The story of Santiago, however, remains an exception in the region. Though Latin American countries, as signatories to the Paris Agreement, have signaled their concrete intention to embrace a low-carbon future, the transition to low and zero-emissions vehicles has been slow. To better understand the challenges in accelerating the adoption of clean technologies in LAC, the World Bank has recently implemented the Clean Bus project, funded by the NDC Support Facility, a contribution to the NDC Partnership.

Think behaviorally to boost impact

In Guatemala, Program Leader Marco Hernandez and his team tested behaviorally informed messages in letters to non-compliant taxpayers. © World Bank

Behaviorally informed policy emphasizes the importance of context for decision making and behavior, paying attention to the social, psychological, and economic factors that affect what people think and do.

Since the 2015 World Development Report on Mind, Society, and Behavior, behavioral science approaches have been spreading across the World Bank Group’s work. Several staffers recently gave “lightning talks” about how they’re applying behavioral science to seemingly intractable problems that matter to all of us. Here are a few takeaways from the speakers who offered important lessons on incorporating human behavior into program design:

FinTech Adoption and its Spillovers. Guest post by Sean Higgins

Development Impact Guest Blogger's picture

During my last trip to Mexico, I bought tamales from a street vendor and paid by card—something that would have been impossible not long ago. The vendor, who had a Bluetooth card reader connected to his cell phone, told me that his potential customers are not always carrying cash, and as a result, accepting card payments has increased his sales. This anecdote illustrates a broader trend: as the adoption of financial technologies (FinTech) increases on both the supply and demand sides of the market (see Figure 1), both consumers and small retail firms benefit.

Numbers (and Alessandro Volta) don’t lie: Anaerobic digestion as a potential solution towards sustainable wastewater re-use and renewable energy for Mexico

Example from part of a biogas plant
By Bertold Werkmann via Shutterstock

In one of Mexico City’s most populated areas, Iztapalapa, there is a street named Alessandro Volta. With little knowledge about who this man was, we researched a bit and found that Alessandro Volta concluded, in 1776, that there was “a direct correlation between the amount of decaying organic matter and the amount of flammable gas produced”. Sir Humphry Davy determined 32 years later (in 1808) that methane was present in the gases produced during the anaerobic digestion (AD) of cattle manure. The first digestion plant was built at a leper colony in Bombay, India in 1859 (just 83 years later!).

Anaerobic digestion (AD) as a renewable resource has been growing since, in the international context, and has the potential to be a sustainable, affordable solution for wastewater management. In the 21^st century, we are still fascinated with the idea of the benefits of biogas production. In modern times, AD is being used as a reliable energy source, and sludge resulting from AD processes can be used as fertilizer. Countries like the UK are producing enough biogas to power 1 million homes, 210 years after Sir Humphry Davy’s discoveries. In fact, according to a new report from the Anaerobic Digestion & Bioresources Association (ADBA) of the UK, in 2017 the total energy generation from anaerobic digestion plants reached 10.7 Terawatt-Hour (TWh) / year.

Fighting Poverty with Cash Transfers: Do Conditions Improve Targeting? Guest Post by Katy Bergstrom

This is the seventh in this year's series of posts by PhD students on the job market.

Conditional cash transfers (CCTs), cash transfers targeted to poor households made conditional on investments in children's human capital, have become increasingly popular over the past two decades (Bastagli et al, 2016). However, CCTs have been criticized as some argue that the poorest households may find the conditions too costly to comply with and thus be excluded from receiving aid (e.g., Freeland, 2007, Baird et al, 2011). Unconditional cash transfers (UCTs), cash transfers with “no strings attached”, are therefore thought to be superior at alleviating current poverty. Consequently, when deciding whether to impose conditions, governments are thought to trade-off the extent to which they increase human capital investments in children versus the extent to which they alleviate current poverty.

Sowing the seeds for rural finance: The impact of support services for credit unions in Mexico

Low and volatile agricultural incomes, poor connectivity, low population density and limited information are just a few reasons that have kept commercial banks away of rural areas in developing countries, where nonbank financial institutions (such as MFIs, cooperatives, or credit unions) have played an important role.

However, these rural institutions tend to be small and often suffer from bad risk management, poor governance, and weak technical and managerial capacity. These constraints are in turn passed on to the borrowers in the form of higher interest rates and credit rationing. The lack of human and organizational capital among lenders is a type of market failure where public interventions may be both effective and market friendly (Besley, 1994).

Maternal Depression and Stunted Children: An Avoidable Reality

Accumulated scientific evidence shows that proper nutrition and stimulation in utero and during early childhood benefit physical and mental well-being later in life and contribute to the development of children’s cognitive and socioemotional skills. Yet, a critical but often overlooked fact in policy design and program development across the world is the association between maternal depression and childhood stunting -- the impaired growth and development measured by low height-for-age.

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