The Nile Story is one of immense
challenges and remarkable achievements for the economic
development of the region. It begins in 1999, when the
ministers in charge of water affairs in the Nile countries
agreed to form the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI). Between 2003
and 2015, the Nile Basin Trust Fund (NBTF) supported and
coordinated cooperative work in the region, which has been
delivered mainly through the NBI. This book, commissioned by

With 2015 marking the transition from
the Millennium to the Sustainable Development Goals, the
international community can celebrate many development
successes since 2000. Three key challenges stand out: the
depth of remaining poverty, the unevenness in shared
prosperity, and the persistent disparities in non-income
dimensions of development. First, the policy discourse needs
to focus more directly on the poorest among the poor. While

This Country Partnership Framework (CPF)
is designed to support the forthcoming Chad Five-Year
Development Plan (2016-2020). It succeeds the Interim
Strategy agreed with the Government of Chad in March 2010.
The Interim Strategy Note (ISN) set out the World Bank
Group’s (WBG’s) support to Chad for the period 2010-2012.
The strategy was composed of three main pillars:
strengthening governance; improving livelihoods and access

In support of the Climate Change and Low
Carbon Green Growth Program of Romania (LCGGP), the World
Bank has prepared the current report with the aim of helping
the Romanian Government to operationalize the strategic path
chosen by the country for implementing its National Climate
Change and Low Carbon Green Growth Strategy 2016-20302
(NSCC) and the associated 2016-2020 Action Plan for Climate
Change (APCC). This includes some relevant institutional

The World Bank Group was a principal founding partner of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) in its pilot phase in 1991, and of the restructured GEF in 1994. The Bank plays three different roles in the GEF: (a) as trustee of the GEF and related trust funds, (b) as implementing agency, including the implementation of private-sector GEF projects by the International Finance Corporation (IFC), and (c) as the host organization of the functionally independent GEF secretariat.

The objective of this Systematic Country
Diagnostic (SCD) is to identify the priority constraints
Bolivia faces in sustaining its gains on reducing poverty
and enhancing shared prosperity over the next years. It will
analyze the dynamics behind the progress achieved in the
past decade on inclusive growth, and identify a number of
key constraints for sustaining and consolidating this
progress. The SCD begins, in Chapter two, with a

Colombia has made impressive strides in
reducing poverty and promoting shared prosperity during the
last decade. Extreme poverty fell from 17.7 percent in 2002
to 8.1 percent in 2014, while total poverty (including
moderate poverty) fell from 49.7 percent in 2002 to 29.5
percent in 2014. The decline implies that 6.2 million people
left poverty in the period. The multidimensional poverty
rate, which takes into account education, health, labor,

This systematic country diagnosis (SCD)
for Chad aims to identify how to achieve the twin goals of
ending poverty and improving shared prosperity. It
acknowledges both: (i) the need for selectivity in pro-poor
interventions, and (ii) the inherent difficulty to do so
given the many competing binding reasons for poverty.
Selectivity means the identification of principal
opportunities for sustainable poverty reduction in the next

The World Bank Group (WBG) Country
Partnership Framework (CPF) for Egypt forFY15-19 has been
prepared at an important juncture in Egypt’s history to
support transformational changes to the economic and social
space. It builds on the Government of Egypt’s (GOE)
medium-term strategy and national priorities for economic
development, responds to client demands, and is informed by
consultations with a broad array of stakeholders in Egypt.

The case for climate action has never
been stronger. Current weather extremes, including storms,
floods and drought, affect millions of people across the
world. Climate change is putting water security at risk;
threatening agricultural and other supply chains as well as
many coastal cities. The likelihood of severe pervasive and
irreversible impacts will grow without action to limit and
reverse the growth of GHG emissions globally. Last year’s

The Tunisia Systematic Country
Diagnostic (SCD) seeks to identify the challenges and
opportunities to achieve the twin goals of reducing poverty
and boosting shared prosperity in a sustainable way. This
SCD takes into account Tunisia’s historical sociopolitical
context and the political economy of past reforms to provide
the context for the challenges and opportunities that exist
today to make progress toward the twin goals. The economic

Between 2002 and 2012-13, most of the
reduction in poverty was due to increased earnings, as
opposed to higher employment or higher transfers. Although
it is hard to be certain, increases in earnings are
associated with: (i) a slow structural transformation away
from agriculture and into industry and services that led to
productivity increases; (ii) agglomeration around key urban
areas that supported this structural transformation; (iii)