Declining soil fertility due to
inadequate farming practices, deforestation and overgrazing
are among the primary impediments to increased agricultural
productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa. These causal factors,
driven by social, economic and political forces, manifest
themselves in market, policy and institutional failures,
inappropriate technologies and practices. This is also the
case in Tanzania where over 90 percent of the population is

The World Bank's just-released
"Global Economic Prospects and the Developing Countries
2001" reports that developing country growth surged to
5.3 percent in 2000, up from 3.2 percent in 1999 and 1.0
percent in 1998. All developing regions experienced faster
growth, though to varying degrees. World growth is expected
to slow to a soft landing in 2001, reflecting monetary
tightening in industrial countries, stock market declines,

In India, as in many developing
countries, land continues to have enormous economic, social,
and symbolic relevance. How access to land can be obtained,
and how ownership of land can be documented, are questions
essential to the livelihoods of the large majority of the
poor, especially in rural and tribal areas. Answers to these
questions will determine to what extent India's
increasingly scarce natural resources are managed. Moreover,

The project ( 1996-2001 - US$22 million
credit ) was uniquely designed as a risk management
instrument - it conceived the establishment of a viable,
government-run system of drought management, through early
warning systems, contingency plans, mitigation and quick
response. The design also devolved responsibility to the
district and community level, encouraging civil servants and
other district development actors to empower local

India's Uttar Pradesh Sodic Lands
Reclamation Project has two objectives. First, it seeks to
reverse the decline of productivity through sustainable
reclamation of sodic lands. Second, it is intended to
prevent additional increases in sodicity through
strengthening local institutions and enabling effective
management of such programs with strong beneficiary
participation and nongovernmental organization (NGO)

The author examine this relationship in
the context of agriculture in Ghana's Eastern Region.
Our work traces the connection from a set of complex and
explicitly negotiable property rights over land to
agricultural investment and, in turn, to agricultural
productivity. Using survey and focus group data, we find
that while the land tenure institutions may have some
benefits, they result in drastically lower productivity for

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

The World Bank, with the financial
support of the Japan Social Development Fund (JSDF), is
implementing the Alternative Indigenous and Afro-Descendants
and Agroforestry Project (COCOA-RAAN) in the indigenous and
Afro-descended (Miskito) regions of Nicaragua. The
implementing agency, the Agro-forestry coordinating
association of indigenous peoples and farmers, is a regional
Non government Organization (NGO) 'focused on seeking

As the world begins to feel the effects
of climate change, the frequency of droughts is increasing
in the Horn of Africa. In Kenya, the drought and food crisis
affect welfare through two main channels. The first channel
is the increased mortality of livestock in drought-affected
areas, which are home to 10 percent of the country's
population. The second channel is by exacerbating increases
in food prices, which are largely driven by worldwide price

This brief includes the following
headings: increasing access to land by the rural poor in
India; and KCP projects on service delivery for the poor.

The World Bank's 2010 study, Arab
Development Assistance: four decades of cooperation, showed
that Arab countries have been generous donors over the
years, particularly the three Gulf countries - Kuwait, Saudi
Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) which represent
over 90 percent of total Arab aid provided by those
countries on which information is available. This paper
confirms that the generosity extends to the period of the