The World Bank has been supporting a comprehensive program to strengthen cooperative management and development within the Zambezi River Basin.
... See More + This program provides regional financing and analytical work that brings together the various commitments within a World Bank-financed portfolio of more than USD 2 billion to facilitate dialogue among the riparian states and further drive the development of climate-resilient water resources for sustainable growth. The application of the Hydropower Sustainability Assessment Protocol in the Zambezi River Basin represents part of this broader program of support to the riparian states toward enhancing development outcomes through improved cooperation and sustainable development. The Hydropower Sustainability Assessment Protocol is a multi-stakeholder tool that evaluates the performance of hydropower projects against globally-applicable sustainability criteria for basic good practice and proven best practice. This Program Report reflects on the project design, objectives, results, and lessons learned from the experience of using the Protocol for guided self-assessment with three hydropower operators in the basin: the Zambezi River Authority, Zesco, and Hidroeléctrica Cahora Bassa.
See Less -
Working Paper 133625 JAN 10, 2019
Wishart,Marcus J.; Lyon,Kimberly Nicole; Nundwe,Cecil; Liden,Mats Johan RikardDisclosed
Progress toward universal health care (UHC) in Africa will require sustained increases in public spending on health and reduced reliance on out-of-pocket financing.
... See More + This article reviews trends and patterns of government spending in the East and Southern Africa regions and points out methodological challenges with interpreting data from the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Global Health Expenditure Database (GHED) and other sources. Government expenditure for health has increased for most countries, albeit at a slower rate than gross domestic product (GDP). In most countries there has been a prioritization away from health in government budgets, putting the onus on the private sector and donors to fill the gap. Donor support is important in the region but reliance on external spending is not consistent with countries’ stated ambitions of universal health coverage. Several methodological challenges with estimating health expenditures are identified. Capturing health expenditures adequately across agencies and levels of decentralization can be challenging, and off-budget funds and arrears are evasive. Measurement error can be significant because actual expenditure information can be hard to come by and is often dated and unreliable. Furthermore, how external financing is captured will affect government health expenditure estimates. These factors have contributed to differences in expenditure estimates between the WHO GHED and country-specific public expenditure reviews and complicate interpretation. The article concludes that it is critical to strengthen national data capacity and international efforts to promote quality and consistency of data. The GHED is an invaluable resource for monitoring and benchmarking health expenditures. It is best used in combination with deep dive country expenditure assessments.
See Less -
An assessment of food security early warning systems (EWSs) was conducted to improve food security and resilience in East and Southern Africa (ESA).
... See More + The study aimed at assessing challenges and opportunities for improving food security EWSs for enhanced resilience in ESA. The performance and capacity of EWSs at the regional economic cooperation level and at select member states were assessed. The challenges that recur across the regional economic communities (RECs) and member states fall into institutional, technical, and sustainability and financial challenges. Actions required to overcome the challenges include: developing and strengthening the food security information system; strengthening of the EWS legal, regulatory, and institutional frameworks; investing in technical capacity development; mainstreaming EWS into agricultural and food security policies, budgetary allocations, and planning frameworks; and support the development of tools to support vulnerable households and communities.
See Less -
This special issue on health financing in East and Sothern Africa comes at an opportune time. Economic growth in the region is contributing to a changing lifestyle and an increasing burden of noncommunicable diseases, such as diabetes, which are costlier to treat.
... See More + Coupled with the unfinished health agenda of communicable diseases and maternal and child health, demand for health care is increasing rapidly and putting financial pressure on governments. A risky response in a resource constrained setting is governments reallocating funds away from the poor to more expensive specialist and tertiary care. Another risky response relates to ways of raising additional revenues, especially in countries where health facilities already charge user fees in the absence of prepayment. Relatively poor patients who pay fees when seeking care may have to sell assets and incur debts, which may push them into poverty or deeper into poverty. Protecting households against falling into poverty and ensuring access to essential health services are thus top priorities for governments committed to universal health coverage (UHC) in the region. Achieving this objective requires solving several pertinent problems.
See Less -
Remittances are an important source of income for households in the Southern African Development Community (SADC), as well as a crucial source of foreign exchange for countries in the region.
... See More + Despite the relatively large inflows of remittances to SADC, the cost of sending money to and within the region is significantly higher than other regions in the world. To address the high cost of remittances globally, the World Bank has been involved in a number of initiatives aimed at improving the efficiency and safety of the market for remittances. At the regional level, the SADC Committee of Central Bank Governors (CCBG) has led several initiatives aimed at enhancing the regional payment system infrastructure, also with a focus on reducing the cost of remittances within the region.
See Less -
Improvements in productivity is necessary to effectively increase economic growth in the long term.The literature emphasises a positive correlation between firm-level innovation and productivity gains, although evidence for developing countries has been less conclusive.
... See More + It is unsurprising then, that policymakers and researchers widely acknowledge that innovation is one of the major drivers of productivity growth, and is therefore of critical importance to the competitiveness and growth of firms and the macro-economy. We look at the dynamics of R&D expenditure in South Africa over the period 2009 to 2014 at the firm level using the South African Revenue Service and National Treasury Firm-Level Panel, which is an unbalanced panel dataset of administrative tax data from 2008 to 2016. Expenditure on R&D is used extensively as a proxy for innovation in the literature as it improves the capability for developing new products and processes and improving existing ones. We use a production function approach to estimate the return to R&D in South African manufacturing firms, a theoretical framework which is the predominant approach in the literature. This paper, however, is one of only a few estimating the return to R&D using firm-level data in a developing country.
See Less -
The objective of the Zambezi River Basin Management Project for Southern Africa; is to strengthen cooperative management and development within the Zambezi River Basin to facilitate sustainable, climate resilient growth.
... See More + Although the three main project activities are on track, there was an initial delay of approximately 24 months at the beginning of the project. This resulted from delayed procurement processes and setbacks in formalizing the establishment of ZAMCOM and the Secretariat. It is proposed that the project be extended for an additional 12 months to ensure that the project development objectives are realized. Additional time is required to achieve the PDO, and specifically to complete the Strategic Plan for the Zambezi Watercourse (ZSP) because of implementation delays and time required for interaction with member states. ZAMCOM has demonstrated commitment to the implementation of the project through its successful completion of one of the three activities, and understands the ZSP to be their highest priority. The change is a no-cost extension of the project closing date, by 12 months, from June 30, 2018 to June 28, 2019. This is the first extension for this project.
See Less -
The development objective of the Strengthening DRR Coordination, Planning and Policy Advisory Capacity of SADC for Southern Africa is to strengthen the disaster resilience of Southern African Development Community (SADC) member states through regional collaboration and improved coordination, planning, policy advisory and knowledge dissemination capacity of SADC.The grant will become effective as soon as the restructuring is approved and signed.
... See More + With the restructuring of the grant the duration of the project has been further shortened from initially 24 months to 18 months.
See Less -
Southern Africa has a long history of human mobility centered around the migration of labor to farms and mines in the region. Patterns of migration and displacement have since been transformed by the end of Apartheid, changing economic systems, and conflict and political instability, both in the region and elsewhere.
... See More + Today mobility in the region is motivated by a combination of diverse social, political and economic reasons; shaped by long-standing historical movements and re-shaped by newer patterns of urbanization and displacement; organized through various legal and extra-legal means and governed by fragmented and contradictory legal frameworks. These complex patterns of migration and displacement, state responses to them, and the implications of mobility for job outcomes in South Africa - as the major destination country in the region - are the subject matter of this study. Our quantitative analysis on the impact of immigration on local jobs in South Africa finds that one immigrant worker generates approximately two jobs for South Africans during the period analyzed (1996 and 2011). These results and the substantiations provided in this publication are significant for policy makers and development actors in South Africa and the wider region, and as such, their implications should be seriously considered.
See Less -
Southern Africa has a long history of human mobility centered around the migration of labor to farms and mines in the region. Patterns of migration and displacement have since been transformed by the end of Apartheid, changing economic systems, and conflict and political instability, both in the region and elsewhere.
... See More + Today mobility in the region is motivated by a combination of diverse social, political and economic reasons; shaped by long-standing historical movements and re-shaped by newer patterns of urbanization and displacement; organized through various legal and extra-legal means and governed by fragmented and contradictory legal frameworks. These complex patterns of migration and displacement, state responses to them, and the implications of mobility for job outcomes in South Africa - as the major destination country in the region - are the subject matter of this study. Our quantitative analysis on the impact of immigration on local jobs in South Africa finds that one immigrant worker generates approximately two jobs for South Africans during the period analyzed (1996 and 2011). These results and the substantiations provided in this publication are significant for policy makers and development actors in South Africa and the wider region, and as such, their implications should be seriously considered.
See Less -
