The development objective of the Deepening Medium Term Budget Framework (MTBF) and Strengthening Financial Accountability Project for Bangladesh is to deepen and institutionalize the MTBF and build a more strategic and performance oriented budget management process, while strengthening financial accountability across the expenditure management cycle.
... See More + This restructuring will bring the following changes: (i) partial extension of the closing date by two months, from July 31, 2014 to September 30, 2014 in order to provide the additional time needed for 26 scholarship students already enrolled in overseas master's programs to complete studies and fund costs related to scholarships for August and September 2014 from the project grant. Only expenditures related to the completion of overseas master's programs for the 26 scholarship students already enrolled will be eligible after July 31, 2014; (ii) a reallocation between spending categories to create a new spending category exclusively for expenditures eligible in the extension period; and (iii) an amendment to the grant agreement (GA) to formalize the above changes.
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The second additional financing of the Social Fund for Development Phase IV Project for Yemen will help finance the costs associated with continuing activities under the project's established and successful Community and Local Development Program.
... See More + Over the remainder of the project period, the second additional financing will improve access to basic services through delivery of poverty-targeted improvements in community infrastructure and building local capacity. The expected outcomes, based on performance of the program to date, include: (a) increased school enrolment, especially of girls; (b) improved access to water; (c) increased agricultural productivity and incomes; (d) access to improved public health services; and (e) reduced travelling time owing to rural road improvements. The second additional financing does not present any implications for the results framework as it supports only existing project activities within the project's existing budget framework and associated targets. However, the results framework for the project as a whole was reviewed and is being revised. Some revisions and clarifications regard how to measure some of the project development objective indicators; in addition, some of the intermediate indicators and targets will be modified to better capture the project results. The original project development objectives are to: (i) improve access to basic services; (ii) enhance economic opportunities; and (iii) reduce the vulnerability of the poor. The objectives, which remain highly relevant, are supported through four components. The first component concerns the Community and Local Development Program. The CLDP activities, to be supported through the proposed second additional financing, are directed to improving access of the poor to basic services. The activities include community-driven small infrastructure projects targeted to poor communities, primarily in the education, water, roads, health, and agriculture sectors. They also include interventions targeted towards the poorest communities and special needs groups as well as local-level capacity building. The second component concerns the Small and Micro Enterprise Development Program which aims to strengthen and build capacity of local microfinance providers and to actively promote entry into the market by creating an enabling environment and by encouraging the establishment of new financial service providers. The third component concerns the Capacity Building Program which supports the other three programs through a focus on capacity-building of local entities, including local and central government bodies, NGOs, and communities, as well as supporting strengthening of the project's own institutional capacity, to include for example monitoring and evaluation, management, and transparency. The fourth component concerns the Labor-Intensive Works Program, providing a cash-for-work safety net to targeted households to bridge their consumption gap during shocks and stagnation of agricultural seasons, while increasing the productive assets of communities and households.
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The World Bank has been supporting this policythrough theprogram China Rural Information and Communications: Technical Assistance on Design and Impact Evaluation, which aims to support the government make decisions about potential scaling up of innovative ICT pilot projects and to generate and disseminate knowledge about the impacts of ICT in rural China.
... See More + Three activities were undertakenwith a focus on a trio of provinces (Guizhou, Jilin, and Shandong): (a) a demand survey to assess rural ICT access and attitudes; (b) a library study including scoping the status of ICT use in rural libraries; and (c) a limited impact evaluation to examine how ICT interventions have affected rural users.
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The development objective of the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) for Early Childhood Education Project for Guyana is to improve emergent literacy and numeracy outcomes for children at the nursery level and primary grade one in hinterland regions and targeted remote riverine areas.
... See More + Some of the negative impacts and mitigation measures include: (1) training of the teachers should be done in the month of July after schools close; (2) setting up extensions of schools and adequate, suitable furniture to accommodate learners and the various learning areas; (3) applying for grants through the Toshao from the various communities and seeking funds and help from other stakeholders; (4) preparing learning guides for parents and digital versatile discs (DVDs) for pupils and distributing to parents at mining camps; and (5) encouraging parents and showing the benefits of the program.
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The development objective of the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) Support to Quality Education Project for Niger is to improve access to schooling, retention of students in school, and the quality of the teaching and learning environment at the basic education level, in the Republic of Niger.
... See More + The project comprises of three components. The first component, expanding equitable access to schooling and retention of students in school aim to increase equitable access to and retention in basic education by tackling supply and demand-side constraints to enrollment. It consists of following three sub-components: (i) education infrastructure; (ii) girls' access to education; and (iii) school feeding and student health. The second component aim to improve the quality of teaching and learning by supporting: (a) increased provision of teaching and learning materials and support to a curriculum review; (b) pre-service and in-service teacher training; and (c) better tools for the measurement and improvement of learning outcomes. It consists of following three sub-components: (i) pedagogical inputs; (ii) teacher training; and (iii) learning outcomes. The third component, strengthening management capacity will support more efficient use of resources for improved access and quality through the development of management and institutional capacity and better incentives at the central, district, school, and project levels in several critical areas. It is divided into following three sub-components: (i) capacity enhancement of the ministries in charge of basic education; (ii) central and decentralized education system management; and (iii) project management and coordination.
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A large fraction of the total supply of paper is produced with technologies that have serious adverse consequences on the environment and cause significant health problems, such as cancer.
... See More + This paper reports on how Internet adoption affects paper consumption. The study used country-level panel data on Internet penetration and paper consumption disaggregated into various paper categories. The empirical strategy is to use fixed-effect models to study whether countries with faster Internet penetration growth have experienced faster declines in paper consumption. The analysis finds that Internet penetration significantly decreases aggregate paper consumption. Further, the estimates show that Internet growth reduces consumption for the paper categories that are more likely to be affected by the diffusion of the Internet (paper used to print newspapers and books and magazines), whereas the growth of the Internet does not have a statistically significant impact on a paper category unlikely to be affected by the Internet (such as sanitary paper).
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS6965 JUL 01, 2014
Open Data initiatives are transforming how governments and other public institutions interact and provide services to their constituents. They increase transparency and value to citizens, reduce inefficiencies and barriers to information, enable data-driven applications that improve public service delivery, and provide public data that can stimulate innovative business opportunities.
... See More + As the gatekeepers of official statistics, National Statistics Offices (NSOs) produce many datasets that could typically comprise the foundation of an Open Data program. They may also have relationships with other data producing agencies in the national statistical system and have expertise in dealing with the many technical and data quality issues attendant in publishing data. In short, they are extremely well placed to make a valuable contribution to Open Data initiatives. Despite these advantages, NSOs do not always feature prominently in government-sponsored Open Data programs and they may be missing an important opportunity to expand the use and re-use of the data they produce. The goal of this working paper is to better understand the opportunities and challenges that Open Data presents to NSOs and to identify what steps and solutions are needed to enable NSOs to play a valuable role in national or sub-national Open Data initiatives.
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Knowledge, learning, and innovation are one of eight objectives that will be monitored in the Bank's new strategy. The independent evaluation group (IEG) is conducting a program of learning and results evaluations to promote a better understanding of how the World Bank acquires, captures, and transfers knowledge and learning in its lending operations, and what scope there is for improving.
... See More + The objective of the program is to delineate attributes of effective learning in World Bank lending. These attributes refer to learning into lending (inputs into project design); learning while lending (feedback and modifications of design and implementation while the project is underway); and learning from lending (lessons from the project that were transmitted to other projects). The evaluation program will assess how the Bank can become better at generating, accessing, and using learning and knowledge in its lending operations. It acknowledges the importance of the feedback from knowledge to learning and from learning back to enhanced knowledge. The report is organized as follows: chapter one gives approach and context. Chapter two explores two essential aspects of learning - knowledge exploitation and knowledge exploration and the factors influencing them. Chapter three examines the contribution of mentoring. Chapter four addresses the extent to which incentives, leadership, and culture are aligned to promote learning in lending. Chapter five considers the implications of the report's findings, for the Bank's change process, for IEG, and for the design of the second evaluation in IEG's learning and results series.
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Support for economic reforms has often shown puzzling dynamics: many reforms that began successfully lost public support. This paper shows that learning dynamics can rationalize this paradox because the process of revealing reform outcomes is an example of sampling without replacement.
... See More + This concept challenges the conventional wisdom that one should begin by revealing reform winners. It may also lead to situations in which reforms that enjoy both ex ante and ex post majority support will still not come to completion. The framework can be used to explain why gradual reforms worked well in China (where successes in Special Economic Zones facilitated further reform), whereas this was much less the case for Latin American and Central and Eastern European countries.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS6973 JUL 01, 2014
The Skills Towards Employability and Productivity (STEP) program was designed to better understand the interplay between skills on the one hand and employability and productivity on the other.
... See More + The STEP program developed survey instruments tailored to collect data on skills in low- and middle-income country contexts. The present note is a reference document for readers seeking background information on the STEP surveys and for users of the data, which is publicly available through the World Banks Microdata Catalog. The note describes the design of the survey instruments and the constructs measured as well as the technical standards and implementation protocols adopted to ensure data quality and comparability across countries. It also provides guidance to users for the construction of aggregated skills indicators and for the use of the reading literacy assessment data.
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Ratings for the Education for all Fast-Track Initiative (EFA-FTI) Catalytic Trust Fund Project for Mongolia were as follows: outcomes were moderately satisfactory, risk to development outcome was moderate, Bank performance was moderately satisfactory, and Grantee performance was moderately satisfactory.
... See More + Some lessons learned included: low income countries, that are experiencing severe financial constraints and are able to afford little more in education than the payment of salaries and other recurrent costs, can often benefit greatly from the infusion of short-term grant funds for financing capital expenditures and other development expenses. Connecting the delivery of services to traditional ways of doing things (for example, putting kindergartens in movable buildings within nomad communities) can often make these services more attractive, affordable, and culturally acceptable. The use of a consultative framework like the education donors' consultative mechanism, which was effectively used as a steering group during the first three years of the project, can be a good way to bring donors together and to promote cooperation and interagency planning. In designing outcome indicators for an intervention or set of interventions like those financed by the EFA-FTI grant, it is critical that the indicators be linked causally to project inputs, processes, and outputs so that there is no question about attribution. Innovative, eco-friendly building designs are becoming increasingly available in a variety of climactic zones (include Mongolia's, characterized by cold and windy conditions) and need to be promoted as a way of saving resources and improving air and water quality. Regarding school construction, given the short construction season in Mongolia due to weather limitations, as well as booming demand, future projects need to plan carefully, assess local capacity, and supervise implementation closely.
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Implementation Completion and Results Report ICR1665 JUN 30, 2014
Ratings for the Better Education through Reformed Management and Universal Teacher Upgrading (BERMUTU) Project for Indonesia were as follows: outcomes were satisfactory, risk to development outcome was low or negligible, Bank performance was satisfactory, and Borrower performance was moderately satisfactory.
... See More + Some lessons learned included: improving teaching quality and performance requires an articulated, focused, and holistic approach, just like the one included in BERMUTU. Ministry of Education and Culture (MoEC) being in the driver seat owning and implementing the program without the need of parallel structures greatly contributed to the satisfactory achievement of the stated project development objectives (PDOs) and ensured technical, institutional, and financial sustainability of BERMUTU's key interventions after the closing date. BERMUTU-follow up programs currently implemented by MoEC and some districts, largely navigating in new and unchartered territory will greatly benefit from a continued technical support from international and multilateral donors providing sound technical advice and linkages with worldwide best practices.
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Implementation Completion and Results Report ICR2655 JUN 30, 2014