In this context, this note summarizes
the findings of a recent World Bank, SACU Secretariat
assessment of regional trade facilitation based on the Trade
and Transport Facilitation Assessment (TTFA) methodology.
The assessment looks at regional trade facilitation through
the lens of value chains, with the objective to understand
how the region’s trade and transport environment could be
improved to facilitate more extensive and deeply integrated

The analysis of the distributional
impact of policy reforms on the well-being or welfare of
different stakeholder groups, particularly on the poor and
vulnerable, has an important role in the elaboration and
implementation of poverty reduction strategies in developing
countries. In recent years this type of work has been
labeled as Poverty and Social Impact Analysis (PSIA) and is
increasingly implemented to promote evidence-based policy

This note reviews the role legal aid can
play as a catalyst to empower and strengthen the livelihoods
of the poor in a World Bank-funded project in the Indian
state of Andhra Pradesh (AP), the AP Rural Poverty Reduction
Project. This note shows how land-related legal aid
activities can be implemented to support community-driven
development project objectives. Initial evidence on the
positive impacts of legal aid on economic and social

Central Asia is often associated with
the silk route or road, the longest overland trade route
connecting China to Europe and one of the oldest in history.
Growth opportunities and the future prosperity of the region
are highly dependent upon the efficiency of its internal and
external supply-chain connections, which is the focus of
this report. Supply-chain connectivity depends on the
quality of the infrastructure on specific routes. This study

This study was undertaken in support of the World Bank
project, Agroweather Tools for Adapting to Climate
Change. The overall goal of this pilot project is to establish
community-based agro-weather risk management
tools. These tools are to be supported by a flow of weather
and climate information via information and communication
technology (ICT) delivery systems.
While some advice is provided on how farmers
can use meteorological and climatological information
in their operations, this is not the main thrust of the

A new generation of information and
communication technologies (ICTs) is finding a small
foothold among poor, small-scale farmers in developing
countries. Even so, many barriers still prevent poor rural
people from accessing, using, and benefiting from new ICT
tools and platforms, and those barriers are arguably higher
for rural women. The relationship between gender and
agriculture has been studied intensively over the years, and

Africa has great potential for
agriculture. Although international commodity prices have
been buoyant, Africa’s supply response seems to be weak. A
variety of constraints may exist. Using the case of
Tanzania, the paper examines the impact of market
connectivity, domestic and international, on farmers’ crop
choices. It is shown that the international market
connectivity, measured by transport costs to the maritime

This paper discusses how catastrophe
crop risk models can be used to assess food security needs
at the sovereign level for the purpose of risk transfer. The
rationale for a system to evaluate food security needs at
the national level is discussed. The role of technology and
remote sensing data availability as an enabler of
catastrophe crop risk models is discussed followed by a
description of the framework of catastrophe crop models for

Migration is transforming rural
economies, landscapes, and potentially, gender relations.
Migration is one of the drivers of the so-called
feminization of agriculture in Latin America. This
feminization has relevance for everyone given agriculture’s
role in regional food security, national shared prosperity,
and household resilience to shocks. The objective of this
study is to investigate the feminization of agriculture as

Economic development critically involves
diversification and structural transformation—that is, the
continued, dynamic reallocation of resources from less
productive to more productive sectors and activities. This
paper documents that, over an extended period, developing
Asia has on average been particularly successful in
diversifying its exports, particularly in comparison with
Sub-Saharan Africa. Much of the progress has occurred

The country’s forest areas occupy 21.7
million ha (approximately 27.6 percent of its total surface
area), and are inhabited by close to 10 percent of its total
population. The forest sector generates a variety of timber
and non-timber products and eco-services. The Turkish
government has put great effort into reforestation and
forest management, increasing the total area of forests. In
their tenth national development plan (2014-2018), the

Climate change is a core development
challenge in Tanzania, and the potential costs of inaction
are significant. Current climate variability (including
extreme events such as droughts and floods), already leads
to major economic costs in mainland Tanzania and in
Zanzibar. Individual annual events have economic costs in
excess of 1 percent of GDP, and occur regularly, reducing
long-term growth and affecting millions of people and