The development objective of Program for Supporting Rural Bridges Project for Bangladesh is to enhance rural connectivity, to improve the preservation and climate resiliency of rural bridge assets, and to strengthen institutional capacity for the development, maintenance and management of rural bridge assets.
... See More + Some of the negative impacts include: (i) the sub-project may create major irreversible environmental damage or may violate an existing environmental rule or regulation; (ii) may encroach into an ECA or a heritage site; (iii) safety of communities and occupational health workers; and (iv) handling of fuels, lubricants, chemicals and hazardous goods/materials onsite, and potential spills from these goods may harm the environment or health of construction workers. Some of the mitigation measures include: (i) declaration of ecologically critical areas; (ii) regulation with respect to vehicles emitting smoke harmful for the environment; (iii) promulgation of standards for quality of air, water, noise, and soils for different areas and for different purposes; and (iv) promulgation of acceptable limits for discharging and emitting waste.
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Program-for-Results Environmental and Social Systems Assessment 130087 SEP 01, 2018
The development objective of the Supporting Primary Healthcare Reform Project for Indonesia is Strengthening the performance of Indonesia’s primary health care system.
... See More + The program is expected to improve performance through strengthening accountability, improving management of health services, and enhancing performance-based financing. Some of negative impacts are include: (i) poor implementation of the accreditation system and lack of ownership from the management of the medical healthcare facilities to carry out the procedures protocols as planned in the accreditation system; (ii) poor handling of medical solid waste in its chain of custody system (poor storage, handling and disposal system at HCF or illegal dumping/storage beyond the facility) will also pose potential adverse impacts to the staff, visitors and the surrounding environment and community; (iii) potential pollution from poor quality effluent to surrounding environment and human health is likely; (iv) without good procedures, the disposal of old medical imaging orradiotherapy equipment in facilities may lead to radiation exposure and leakages if not well managed or properly decommissioned; (v)health care providers and personnel may be exposed to general infections, blood-borne pathogens, and other potential infectious materials during care and treatment, as well as during collection, handling, storage, treatment, and disposal of health care waste; (vi) risk of fire in health care facilities due to poor storage facilities, handling and presence of chemicals, pressurized gases, boards, plastics and other flammable substrates; Some of the mitigation measures are include: (i strengthening performance monitoring for increased local government and facility accountability; (ii) improving implementation of national standards for greater local government and facility performance; (iii) strengthen implementation of priority programs for maternal and child health, including immunization, as well as nutrition, communicable (especially TB) and non-communicable diseases; (iv) enhancing performance orientation of health financing for better local service delivery.
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Program-for-Results Environmental and Social Systems Assessment 126267 FEB 01, 2018
This Good Practice Note (GPN) provides the private sector with guidance on identifying, mitigating and remedying modern slavery risks. It serves as a comprehensive resource for two main audiences: investors and companies.
... See More + The investor audience includes banks, private equity firms and other financial actors that provide finance to private companies in emerging markets. For companies, this GPN provides guidance on potential actions to take across a range of sectors where there may be risks of modern slavery. The GPN further offers Development Finance Institutions (DFIs) with guidance on modern slavery risks associated with their portfolio companies. The GPN does not create new standards. Instead, it aims to provide practical support on how to better identify issues and integrate actions to address modern slavery into existing environmental and social management systems. For standards on modern slavery, readers should refer to existing conventions of the International Labour Organization, national laws, company and investor standards, and other existing instruments, many of which are referenced in this note.
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Safety nets in Africa are a popular policy instrument to address the widespread chronic poverty and encourage human capital investments in the education and health of children.
... See More + Although there have been considerable analyses on the impacts of safety nets globally, particularly in Latin America, less been done on synthesizing results across Sub-Saharan African programs. This study fills this gap by systematically extracting and standardizing the results across impact evaluations for better understanding of what has been achieved using this policy instrument in the continent. The study finds that these programs on average have significant positive impacts on total and food consumption. The programs show promising results on asset accumulation, such as livestock ownership. However, there is substantial heterogeneity in the impacts achieved across programs for some development outcomes. Through exploring this heterogeneity in impacts, the study puts forward several suggestions for better targeting various development outcomes through modifications in the design and implementation of safety net programs.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8255 NOV 22, 2017
The objective of the Urban Water and Sanitation OBA Fund for Low Income Areas Project is to increase the number of people in low income areas with access to improved water supply and sanitation services in Kenyan towns and cities.
... See More + This objective will be realized by incentivizing urban Water Services Providers to invest in water supply and sanitation improvement subprojects to benefit households in low income areas by applying one-off Output-Based Aid subsidies to make water and sanitation access affordable. Some of the negative impacts and mitigation measures include: providing compensation for loss of assets at replacement cost; ensuring that resettlement activities are implemented with appropriate disclosure of information, consultation, and the informed participation of those affected, and improve or at least restore the livelihoods and standards of living of affected people; Provide additional targeted assistance (e.g., credit facilities, training, or job opportunities) and opportunities to improve or at least restore their income, earning capacity, production levels, and standards of living to economically displaced persons whose livelihoods or income levels are adversely affected; special consideration will be given to especially disadvantaged and/or vulnerable people such as women, children, the very old and the unemployed. Provision will be made to enhance their rights to resettlement and compensation payments. For example, the consent of spouses and children where it applies shall be a sought prerequisite for compensation payment, as provided by the Land Act (2012); the project will promote and provide in-kind compensation as an option for especially vulnerable groups and project affected community resources and facilities; the project will consider a 15 percent livelihood/disturbance allowance in addition to the assessed compensation values for affected property; and in consideration of the differences between national legislation and the World Bank safeguard policy on involuntary resettlement, the higher of the two standards will be followed, where it best applies in this RAP, since this approach also satisfies the requirements of the lesser standard.
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Could a partial subsidy for child education increase children's participation in paid work? In contrast to much of the theoretical and empirical child labor literature, this paper shows that child work and school participation can be complements under certain conditions.
... See More + Using data from the randomized evaluation of a conditional cash transfer program in the Philippines, the analysis finds that some children, who were in neither school nor work before the program, increased participation in school and work-for-pay after the program. Earlier cash transfer programs, notably those in Mexico, Brazil, and Ecuador, increased school attendance while reducing child labor. Those programs fully offset schooling costs, while the transfers under the Philippine transfers fall short of the full costs of schooling for a typical child. As a result, some beneficiary children from poor Philippine households increased work to support their schooling. The additional earnings from this work represent a substantive share of the shortfall in the schooling costs net of transfer. The paper rules out several potential alternative explanations for the increase in child labor, including changes in household productive activities, adult labor supply, and household expenditure patterns that, in principle, can arise after a cash transfer and may also affect the supply of or demand for child labor.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8182 SEP 06, 2017
De Hoop,Jacobus Joost; Friedman,Jed; Kandpal,Eeshani; Rosati,Furio CamilloDisclosed
To assess the conventional view that assets uniformly improve childhood development through wealth effects, this paper tests whether different types of assets have different effects on child education.
... See More + The analysis indicates that household durables and housing quality have the expected positive effects, but agricultural assets have adverse effects on highest grade completed and no effects on exam performance. Extending the standard agricultural-household model by explicitly including child labor, the study uses three waves of panel data from Tanzania to estimate the effects of household assets on child education. The analysis corrects for the endogeneity of assets and uses a Hausman-Taylor instrumental variable panel data estimator to identify the effects of time-invariant observables and more efficiently control for time-invariant unobservables. The negative effect of agricultural assets is more pronounced among rural children and children from farming households, presumably due to the higher opportunity cost of their schooling.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8071 MAY 22, 2017
Many policy instruments can be used to address or affect child labor, even if they are implemented to achieve other objectives. From a theoretical point of view, however, the impact of these policies on child labor is undetermined.
... See More + This paper discusses the evidence generated by rigorous evaluations on the impact on child labor of labor market programs, conditional and unconditional transfers, and microcredit, among other social programs and interventions. The study finds that although transfer programs generally tend to reduce child labor, other policies risk increasing child labor, especially if they affect households' productive opportunities. The findings also point to knowledge gaps that should be addressed in future evaluations. While progress has been made over the past decade, there is still much to learn about the effects of public policy on the labor participation of many children in developing countries.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS7999 MAR 07, 2017
De Hoop,Jacobus Joost; Dammert,Ana C.; Mvukiyehe,Eric; Rosati,Furio CamilloDisclosed
Ethiopia has made considerable progress in maternal, newborn, and child health in terms of healthoutcomes and health services coverage. This study examined how different groups have fared in the process.
... See More + It alsolooked at possible factors behind the inequalities. The study examined 11 maternal and child health outcomes and services: stunting, underweight,wasting, neonatal mortality, infant mortality, under-5 mortality, measles vaccination, full immunization, moderncontraceptive use by currently married women, antenatal care visits, and skilled birth attendance. It explored trendsin inequalities by household wealth status based on Demographic and Health Surveys conducted in 2000, 2005,2011, and 2014. The study also investigated the dynamics of inequality, using concentration curves for differentyears. Decomposition analysis was used to identify the role of proximate determinants.The study found substantial improvements in health outcomes and health services: Although there is still a considerable gap between the rich and the poor, inequalities in health services have been reduced. However, child nutrition outcomes have mainly improved for the rich. The changes observed in wealth-related inequality tend toreflect the changing direct effect of household wealth on child health and health service use.The country’s efforts to improve access to health services have shown some positive results, butattention should now turn to service quality and to identifying multisectoral interventions that can change outcomes for the poorest.
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Journal Article 123240 JAN 01, 2017
Ambel,Alemayehu A.; Andrews,Colin; Bakilana,Anne Margreth; Foster,Elizabeth; Khan,Qaiser M.; Wang,HuihuiDisclosed
This is the first study to investigate the short- and long-term causal effects of a child-labor ban. The study explores the law that increased the minimum employment age from 14 to 16 in Brazil in 1998, and uncovers its impact on time allocated to schooling and work in the short term and on school attainment and labor market outcomes in the long term.
... See More + The analysis uses cross-sectional data from 1998 to 2014, and applies a fuzzy regression discontinuity design to estimate the impact of the ban at different points of individuals’ lifecycles. The estimates show that the ban reduced the incidence of boys in paid work activities by 4 percentage points or 27 percent. The study finds that the fall in child labor is mostly explained by the change in the proportions of boys working for pay and studying, and observes an increase in the proportion of boys only studying as a consequence. The results suggest that the ban reduced boys’ participation in the labor force. The study follows the same cohort affected by the ban over the years, and finds that the short-term effects persisted until 2003 when the boys turned 18. The study pooled data from 2007 to 2014 to check whether the ban affected individuals’ stock of human capital and labor market outcomes. The estimates suggest that the ban did not have long-term effects for the whole cohort, but found some indication that it did negatively affect the log earnings of individuals at the lower tail of the earnings distribution.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS7796 AUG 15, 2016
Piza,Caio; Portela Fernandes De Souza,AndreDisclosed
This is the second and final Progress Report to the Board of Executive Directors (the Board) on the implementation of actions undertaken by Management (as presented in the Management Response) to address concerns from Requesters related to the Uzbekistan: Second Rural Enterprise Support Project (RESP II) and the Additional Financing for the Second Rural Enterprise Support Project (RESP II AF).
... See More + The request raised that due to lack of adequate measures to prevent Bank funding from being used for agricultural lands in which child and forced adult labor (C/FL) is practiced, the project contributes to the government’s policy of organized forced and child labor. In its Report and Recommendation submitted to the Board on December 9, 2013, the Inspection Panel noted and appreciated the significant positive trends that had emerged with respect to the critical issues of child labor, including actions already taken and further commitments and intentions on the part of the Government of Uzbekistan (GoU) and its partners. On November 17, 2014, Bank Management submitted a Progress Report on the Implementation of the Management Actions, stating that all but one action had been successfully completed. On November 20, 2015, the Bank, jointly with the International Labor Organization (ILO), provided a presentation reporting on the progress of the remaining action, which was the implementation of Third Party Monitoring (TPM) and Grievance Redress Mechanism (later renamed FBM). The Bank has made considerable progress in its dialogue with the GoU and its development partners in addressing the systemic issues concerning C/FL in the cotton sector in Uzbekistan. Bank Management continues to implement a multi-faceted approach to the reform of the cotton production system while providing adequate support to the GoU to implement these reforms.As part of the risk mitigation efforts, the Bank is continuing its partnership with the ILO and working on strengthening and improving the operation of TPM/FBM during the 2016 harvest. These activities are also supplemented by broader capacity building efforts aimed to improve labor relations in cotton harvest in Uzbekistan. In addition to that, the World Bank Group is leading a broader dialogue on agricultural modernization, aiming to facilitate systemic changes in the cotton sector and beyond.
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Inspection Panel Report and Recommendation 107735 JUL 28, 2016
Gender gaps in education have closed in almost all countries, especially at the primary level. In fact, these gaps have reversed in many countries in secondary education, especially in Latin America, the Caribbean, and East Asia, where it is now boys and young men who are disadvantaged.
... See More + Despite the overall progress, however, primary and secondary school enrollments for girls remain much lower than for boys for disadvantaged populations in many Sub-Saharan countries and some parts of South Asia (World Bank 2012). One of the key messages of the World Development Report on Gender Equality and Development is that much of the progress was possible when the removal of a single barrier was sufficient to make significant gains. Three main areas where this has been possible are: (i) increasing returns to education for women; (ii) removing institutional constraints; and (iii) increasing household incomes. In this policy brief, we summarize the extant evidence in these three areas and draw some policy conclusions.
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