The project aims at improving food security and reducing rural poverty of smallholder farmers through providing guidance and technical support to enhance the quality, impact and sustainability of Agricultural Water Management (AWM) investments. Water is crucial to economies and to livelihoods and is central for poverty reduction. Sufficient availability and reliable access to water is commonly a constraint, not only to food production, but also to social and economic development and sustainability. Water plays a pivotal role around which other interventions can be organized.

Ce projet vise à améliorer la sécurité alimentaire et á réduire la pauvreté rurale des petits agriculteurs en fournissant des conseils et un soutien technique pour améliorer la qualité, l'impact et la durabilité des investissements dans le cadre de la gestion de l’eau à usage agricole (GEA). L’eau est essentielle au développement économique et comme moyen d’existence et joue un rôle central dans la réduction de la pauvreté rurale.

This paper aims to contribute to
learning on community engagement and community driven
development (CDD) in urban areas. Specifically, the review
describes the World Bank’s use of participatory and CDD
approaches in urban areas between 2003 and 2013; identifies
the challenges of using participatory and CDD approaches in
the urban context; assesses lessons from the application of
CDD in urban areas through case studies; and makes

This paper presents the conceptual framework for a training program on
integrating disaster risk reduction and climate-change mitigation into
Agriculture and Rural Development Department (ARD) programming. Its
target audience consists of World Bank task team leaders and their national
counterparts and partners working in agriculture and rural settings.

The objective of this study is to analyse the impact of various types of
government spending on growth and poverty reduction, using provincial level data over
the last decade. Government spending reduces poverty through many channels such as
agricultural growth and improved nonfarm employment. We will try to capture all these
different effects in the analysis if the data allow. This paper opens with a review of
Vietnam’s economic reforms and growth over the past decade. We then sketch Vietnam’s

Recent studies have focused on the 'silent' agricultural revolution that occurred in rural West German society during the postwar period. The purpose of this paper is to provide a new framework by reviewing these recent studies in three research fields: (1) German rural social history, (2) the history of German agricultural policy, and (3) the ecological aspects of the land consolidation program ('Flurbereinigung').

This Systematic Country Diagnostic (SCD) identifies the binding constraints to reducing extreme poverty and promoting shared prosperity in Ethiopia. Achieving those goals requires a two pronged strategy of building on the strengths of past performance as well as introducing new elements. Progress in rural livelihoods drove poverty reduction in the past and will likely do so in the future. In addition, faster, and more inclusive, private sector-led structural change and ‘getting urbanization right’ are essential going forward.

This report summarizes the results, lessons and recommendations to the Government of Lao PDR from two Technical Assistance projects (TA) “Supporting Demand Creation for Sanitation through Community Led Total Sanitation” and “Sanitation Marketing in Lao PDR” carried out by the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Program between October 2012 and December 2015. The development objective of the TAs was to increase improved sanitation and hygiene practices and change community behavior to achieve Open Defecation Free (ODF) status at the village level.

The term “inclusive cities” is
increasingly being used as a “catch-all” phrase to signify
intent but with little precision in its use. In this note we
use “inclusive cities” to mean cities in which we see a
commitment to an inclusive politics with the establishment
of institutionalized interactions between organized groups
of disadvantaged citizens and the state with local
government taking a primary role. They are also cities in

Although weather shocks are a major
source of income fluctuation, most of the world's poor
lack insurance coverage against them. Absence of formal
insurance contributes to poverty traps, as investment
decisions are conflicted with risk management ones:
risk-averse farmers tend to underinvest and produce lower
yielding yet safer crops. In the past few years, weather
index insurance has gained increasing attention as an

Section one of the papers provides a
brief overview of the relationship between the Sahel region
of Africa and climate variability trends and predictions,
ultimately posing the primary research question of the
study: Is the Sahel region more likely to have a higher
probability of conflict and migration as a result of climate
change and climate change-related events? In section two,
research and analysis aim to identify causal paths between

Recent surveys show considerable
progress in maternal and child health in Ethiopia. The
improvement has been in health outcomes and health services
coverage. The study examines how different groups have fared
in this progress. It tracked 11 health outcome indicators
and health interventions related to millennium development
goals one, four, and five. These are stunting, underweight,
wasting, neonatal mortality, infant mortality, under -five