The purpose of this note is to provide the monetary cost of various social safety net
targeting schemes that can be deployed to reduce vulnerability and increase resilience. It is
believed that gradually switching to the provision of social safety nets can reduce the chronic
dependency on humanitarian (mainly food) aid. At the same time, it could help to alleviate reliance
on patronage networks and switch a portion of the public spending from unproductive uses (e.g.,

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

This paper brings together sociological
theories of culture and gender to answer the question – how
do large-scale development interventions induce cultural
change? Through three years of ethnographic work in rural
Bihar, the authors examine this question in the context of
Jeevika, a World Bank-assisted poverty alleviation project
targeted at women, and find support for an integrative view
of culture. The paper argues that Jeevika created new

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

Agricultural risk management is a
central issue that Mozambique faces in development, and
multiple stakeholders have analyzed this challenge,
sometimes with different terminology and focusing on varying
aspects. The government of Mozambique has adopted the
strategic plan for agricultural development (PEDSA 2010-19)
that focuses on: (i) increasing the availability of food in
order to reduce hunger through growth in small producer

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

The last poverty assessment for Rwanda
was conducted in 1997. Three years after the genocide, the
country was characterized by deep and widespread poverty,
rock-bottom health indicators, and pervasive hunger and food
insecurity. In real terms, gross domestic product (GDP) per
capita was lower than it had been in 1960. In real terms,
the economy quadrupled between 1995 and 2013. Enrolment in
primary school is near universal and infant and child

The contribution of women to labor in
African agriculture is regularly quoted in the range of 60
to 80 percent. Using individual-disaggregated, plot-level
labor input data from nationally representative household
surveys across six Sub-Saharan African countries, this study
estimates the average female labor share in crop production
at 40 percent. It is slightly above 50 percent in Malawi,
Tanzania, and Uganda, and substantially lower in Nigeria (37

The Country Opinion Survey in Bolivia
assists the World Bank Group (WBG) in gaining a better
understanding of how stakeholders in Bolivia perceive the
WBG. It provides the WBG with systematic feedback from
national and local governments, multilateral/bilateral
agencies, media, academia, the private sector, and civil
society in Bolivia on 1) their views regarding the general
environment in Bolivia; 2) their overall attitudes toward

The report Africa Can Help Feed Africa
(World Bank 2012) showed that increasing food staples1
supply can be met by better connecting African markets to
each other. That report called for a stronger focus on
removing trade barriers and building on the forces of
regional integration. This report builds on the lessons of
Africa Can Help Feed Africa by looking into the specific
circum¬stances met in West Africa, home to one-third of the

This report is the result of a World
Bank mission that visited Paraguay in June 2013 at the
request of the Government of Paraguay. The mission’s
objective was to identify, quantify, and prioritize
agriculture risks that determine the volatility of
agriculture gross domestic product (GDP), based on a
methodology to assess sector risks developed by the World
Bank. The methodology stipulates a two-phase process. The

Today, the world is at a conjuncture where issues of exclusion and inclusion are assuming new significance for both developed and developing countries. The imperative for social inclusion has blurred the distinction between these two stylized poles of development. Countries that used to be referred to as developed are grappling with issues of exclusion and inclusion perhaps more intensely today than they did a decade ago. And countries previously called developing are grappling with both old issues and new forms of exclusion thrown up by growth.