East Sudan has received a continuous
influx of internally displaced persons (IDPs) and refugees
over the last forty years. Mass influxes were witnessed
during years when the region experienced natural
catastrophes as droughts and floods, or an escalation of
tensions and conflict in neighboring countries, mainly
Eritrea and Ethiopia. Presently there is still a steady but
smaller in numbers influx of refugees, mostly from Eritrea,

This report summarizes the findings of a
study aimed at exploring key elements of a benchmarking
framework for urban transport. Unlike many industries where
benchmarking has proven to be successful and
straightforward, the multitude of the actors and
interactions involved in urban transport systems may make
benchmarking a complex endeavor. It was therefore important
to analyze what has been done so far, propose basic

In Japan, the sustainable development of
cities and provinces has been vigorously pursued since the
late 1990s under various programs through the initiative of
the central government and local authorities. In 2009, the
World Bank launched an urban development initiative called
Eco2 Cities: Ecological Cities as Economic Cities (Eco2
Cities Initiative) to help cities in developing countries
achieve greater synergistic ecological and economic

Housing development has direct and
indirect impacts on the environment. Through its design,
construction, and operation, housing represents a
significant point of direct consumption of natural
materials, water, and energy. Therefore, greenhouse gas
emissions embodied in housing can be very significant.
Moreover, in Brazil, civil construction is responsible for
the largest percentage of solid waste volume generated in

Kenya will need to navigate through
another economic storm in 2011. This will reduce growth to a
projected 4.8 percent, which is still substantially higher
than the average of the last decade. The decade started on a
bullish note for Kenya. In 2010, growth was higher than
expected at 5.6 percent. If growth accelerated to 6 percent,
Kenya could reach Middle Income Country status by 2019.
Kenya is at the threshold of a major demographic transition

The expanding coverage of social
assistance in Vietnam raises a question of whether relevant
arrangements at all levels are sufficiently robust to handle
a larger program. This note explores institutional and
delivery aspects of formal and informal social assistance in
metropolitan cities. It is a result of a rapid assessment of
governance and administration of social assistance in
metropolitan cities, including interviews with related

During the past several months, the
Ministry of Environment, Housing and Territorial Development
of Colombia has been researching potential indicators that
would be useful to assess and possibly adopt among which
included the ecological footprint. This work was
commissioned in order to provide the Ministry with a deeper
understanding of the ecological footprint and to train a
number of its staff on the scope of the footprint in order

This report provides a synthesis of key
findings of sector studies undertaken in Vietnam in the
context of the EACC study. The sector studies were on
agriculture (Zhu & Guo 2010), a separate computable
general equilibrium [CGE] analysisbased on
agriculture findings (Adams et al. 2010), aquaculture (Kam
et al. 2010), forestry (Phuong). At the global level, the
EACC study estimates that it will costbetween $70

This report describes theTransforming
Settlements of the Urban Poor in Uganda. A Secondary Cities
Support Program (TSUPU), is the first national initiative
within the Cities Alliance's global programme, Land,
Services and Citizenship for the Urban Poor (LSC). The first
premise of the Medium Term Strategy is that the Cities
Alliance should prioritise working with those governments
already committed to change and reform over time for three

Big cities are becoming even bigger and
these have been and will be the key drivers of economic
growth in Serbia. Belgrade, Novi Sad, Nis and Kragujevac,
Serbia's four largest cities contributed to about 60
percent of the increase of value added in the economy over
the period 2001-2008. These four largest cities in 2008
accounted for about two thirds of country s economy. Spatial
characteristics of foreign direct investments inflow,

This report describes a pilot study of
natural risk hazards in the peri-urban extension areas of
the Dakar Metropolitan Area, Senegal. The area subject of
this study stretches across 580 square kilometers, covering
less than 1 percent of the national territory, but housing
about 50 percent of Senegal's urban population. Much of
the rapid population growth of the Dakar Metropolitan Area
is taking place beyond the boundaries of the Department of

This report attempts to diagnose
existing constraints and prospects for growth in
people's incomes in South Kordofan. Given the breadth
and depth of difficulties facing the state, the focus is on
identifying the key areas of reform, or binding constraints,
to growth. There is a combination of extremely low social
returns, the prevalence of government and market failures,
the weak investment climate and the limited access to