El Salvador is the smallest country in
Central America, and one of the most densely populated in
the world. El Salvador is among the countries most affected
by weather-related events and other hazards, incurring
annual losses of around 2.5 percent of GDP. Worldwide, it
ranks second highest for risk exposure to two or more
hazards and highest for the total population at a relatively
high risk of mortality. Furthermore, climate change is

The Country Partnership Framework (CPF)
will succeed the Myanmar interim strategy note (FY13-14) and
be the first full country strategy for Myanmar since 1984.
This CPF comes at a time of great opportunity for Myanmar;
over the three year period covered in this CPF, the reforms
initiated in 2011 have the potential to bring Myanmar into a
new era of peace and prosperity. Myanmar s history, ethnic
diversity, and geography combine into a unique set of

Botswana has been one of the worlds
fastest growing economies over the past 50 years, allowing
the country to move from being among the poorest to upper
middle income status - this has had the effect of pulling
the majority of the population out of poverty. While
Botswana is rightly praised for its management of resource
wealth, it is apparent that the high levels of investment by

Myanmar is going through a critical transformation
in its development path - from isolation and
fragmentation to openness and integration; and
from pervasive state control, exclusion, and individual
disengagement, to inclusion, participation,
and empowerment. This dual shift is happening
against a backdrop of broader political reforms that
started in 2011 when a new administration took office.
The country’s transition after the planned elections in
2015 will be a major test of the progress on political

This systematic country diagnosis (SCD)
for Chad aims to identify how to achieve the twin goals of
ending poverty and improving shared prosperity. It
acknowledges both: (i) the need for selectivity in pro-poor
interventions, and (ii) the inherent difficulty to do so
given the many competing binding reasons for poverty.
Selectivity means the identification of principal
opportunities for sustainable poverty reduction in the next

This document presents the Systematic
Country Diagnosis (SCD) for Mali. The SCD was prepared
following a consultative process within and outside the
World Bank. It identifies constraints and opportunities for
achieving the twin goals of ending poverty and improving
shared prosperity by 2030 while acknowledging (i) the need
for selectivity in pro-poor interventions, and (ii) the many
competing ‘binding’ reasons for poverty in Mali. The

The report starts with an overview of
poverty and inequality estimates in chapter one, focusing on
the trends in poverty and the distributional pattern of
growth between 2002-3 and 2012-13. Chapter two then provides
a description of the poverty profile by geographical and
household characteristics, both in terms of the levels of
poverty and its rate of change. Consumption patterns are
presented in chapter three, and other socio-economic

This report presents a brief discussion
of indigenous peoples’ development as evidenced in a select
number of case studies about World Bank financed projects
that had a positive impact on indigenous peoples’
communities. The main objective of this study is to identify
and document good practices and lessons learned that can be
shared with World Bank staff, borrower governments, and
Indigenous Peoples’ organizations to help improve the design

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

Between 2008 and 2012 the urban/rural poverty divide substantially narrowed
down, which was the result of relatively stable rural and rising urban poverty rates. Over the same period, food inflation spiked, whereby strong links between domestic and global price movements were observed owed to major import dependence on food. The high shares of consumption that households dedicate to food, especially among the poor, leave limited scope to deal with food price surges by economizing on non-food

Mauritania is a vast country covering
over a million square kilometers, where a relatively small
population of 3.5 million people lives on just one-fifth of
the country’s total area. With extremely advanced
desertification, the country is particularly vulnerable to
the impact of climate change and other external shocks. The
main sources of income in Mauritania are agriculture, which
is either irrigated or rain-fed, and livestock. This is

As part of the 2006-2011 National
Development Plan, the Plurinational State of Bolivia
launched two cash transfer programs and one youth labor
training program aimed at promoting the accumulation of
households’ human capital: the Juancito Pinto Educational
Grant, the Juana Azurduy Mother-Child Grant, and my first
decent job. The objective of this paper is to analyze the
effectiveness of the targeting mechanisms utilized in these