Severe weather conditions can undo even the best efforts of families to break free of poverty. Households that rely on subsistence or small-scale farming are especially at the mercy of severe weather.
... See More + Droughts and floods wipe out crops, leaving families hungry or without anything to sell to pay for essentials such as school fees or medicines. Indeed, empirical evidence from many parts of the developing world has established large welfare losses following weather shocks in developing countries. Climate changes have made weather even more variable in many countries, exacerbating problems such as droughts, extreme temperatures and flooding. In Nicaragua, the second poorest country in Latin America after Haiti, poverty is compounded by weather conditions. To understand what might allow families to better manage risks, the World Bank supported an evaluation of a pilot program in Nicaragua to encourage rural households to diversify beyond small-scale farming. This poverty and equity notes covers the conditional cash transfers to cope with severe weather conditions in Nicaragua as of March 2018.
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The objective of the Additional Financing for the Access and Quality in Higher Education Project is to improve the quality of tertiary education in participating institutions and to increase the enrollment of students from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds in quality programs.
... See More + The AF will also include a modification of component 1.2 (provision of Créditos Condonables). While the preference criteria for beneficiaries (Selected Graduate Students) of these Créditos Condonables (e.g., teachers, specific ethnic groups, and students from public institutions, students pursuing careers in areas of national priority) remains unchanged, the eligibility criteria for Selected Universities will be adjusted: First, in addition to students attending graduate programs in foreign universities, the Project will include the mobility of PhD students from accredited national TEI or programs, with a mandatory international component and in association with an international university partner ranked in the Shanghai Ranking4. This change seeks to increase the number of project beneficiaries, since the cost of national PhD programs is substantially lower than foreign universities. Second, national PhD students will only be financed when a component of the PhD program seeks to incentivize international collaborations and promotes the internationalization of Colombian graduate programs.
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Ratings for the Chongqing Urban-Rural Integration Project for China were as follows: outcome was moderately unsatisfactory, Bank performance was moderately unsatisfactory, and monitoring and evaluation quality was modest.
... See More + Some lessons learned included: having alternative subprojects ready to go will have reduced the long delays seen between the decision to drop a subcomponent and appraisal of a replacement. Another way to increase flexibility is to avoid listing the specific sectors to be included under access to services but to let the key performance indicators (KPIs) and Intermediate Outcome Indicators (IOI) define those service areas. During preparation, the Bank brought in expertise from these disciplines, but this was less the case for supervision. Selecting fewer project sites and supplying each with more inputs will demonstrate the intensity of impacts possible with a multi-sectoral approach, rather than focusing on a widespread area which diluted effects. Care needs to be taken during restructurings to make sure the theory of change remains clear, and indicators cover outcomes from the revised project.
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Implementation Completion and Results Report ICR4173 FEB 08, 2018
The objective of the Education Reform Project for Moldova is to improve learning conditions in targeted receiving schools and strengthen the Recipient’s education monitoring systems, while promoting efficiency reforms in the education sector.
... See More + The additional financing will help cover the costs associated with the scale-up of selected activities initiated under the original credit, as well as the addition of a few new complementary activities. Through this scale-up, the AF seeks to deepen the developmental impact of the Moldova Education Reform Project. To a lesser extent, the proposed AF would also offset exchange rate losses and address a gap in financing for technical assistance under the original project.
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In 2011, the World Bank Group commenced a multiyear program designed to support countries in systematically examining and strengthening the performance of their education systems.
... See More + Part of the World Bank's Education Sector Strategy, the evidence‐based initiative called SABER (Systems Approach for Better Education Results) is building a toolkit of diagnostics for examining education systems and their component policy domains against global standards, best practices, and in comparison with the policies and practices of countries around the world. By leveraging this global knowledge, the SABER tools fill a gap in the availability of data and evidence on what matters most for improving the quality of education and achieving better results. This report discusses the results of applying the SABER School Autonomy and Accountability (SAA) tool in Guinea‐Bissau.
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