Africa's growing demand for food has been met increasingly by imports from the global market. This, coupled with rising global food prices, brings ever-mounting food import bills. In addition, population growth and changing demand patterns will double demands over the next 10 years. Two key issues must be addressed: (a) establishing a consistent and stable policy environment for regional trade in fertilizers; and (b) investing in institutions that reduce the transaction costs of coordination failures.

Paul Wolfowitz, President of the World Bank, congratulated the editorial team of National Geographic for the special issue on Africa. National Geographic has played a unique role in broadening the knowledge of the world. The World Bank partnered with National Geographic to produce a full-color wall map to raise awareness of the millennium development goals (MDGs) and to highlight each country's progress. We often hear about an Africa that is ravaged by poverty, disease and conflict. There is another face to Africa, one of hope, ambition, energy, intelligence and achievement.

This report aims to extract lessons on slum upgrading and involuntary resettlement policies and practices learned from the process of addressing the Badia East case, which involved complex interactions between affected people, NGOs, the Bank and Lagos State Government.

Recent surveys show considerable progress in maternal and child health in Ethiopia. The improvement has been in health outcomes and health services coverage. The study examines how different groups have fared in this progress. It tracked 11 health outcome indicators and health interventions related to Millennium Development Goals 1, 4, and 5. These are stunting, underweight, wasting, neonatal mortality, infant mortality, under-five mortality, measles vaccination, full immunization, modern contraceptive use by currently married women, antenatal care visits, and skilled birth attendance.

This note aims to provide information and analysis as a basis for a better understanding of the challenges and constraints of achieving gender equality in Bolivia, with a special focus on the intersectionality between gender and ethnicity. Combining and analyzing existing evidence and new data, it seeks to document gender-specific disparities in development outcomes, highlight opportunities and constraints to women’s empowerment, and identify areas in which continuing knowledge gaps are particularly important to understand and address gender inequalities.

This Systematic Country Diagnostic (SCD) identifies the binding constraints to reducing extreme poverty and promoting shared prosperity in Ethiopia. Achieving those goals requires a two pronged strategy of building on the strengths of past performance as well as introducing new elements. Progress in rural livelihoods drove poverty reduction in the past and will likely do so in the future. In addition, faster, and more inclusive, private sector-led structural change and ‘getting urbanization right’ are essential going forward.

Moldova has experienced rapid economic growth in the past decade, which has been accompanied by reductions in poverty and good performance in shared prosperity. Nonetheless, Moldova remains one of the poorest countries in Europe and faces challenges in sustaining the progress. The challenges for progress include spatial and cross-group inequalities, particularly because of unequal access to assets, services and economic opportunities.

This report summarizes the results, lessons and recommendations to the Government of Lao PDR from two Technical Assistance projects (TA) “Supporting Demand Creation for Sanitation through Community Led Total Sanitation” and “Sanitation Marketing in Lao PDR” carried out by the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Program between October 2012 and December 2015. The development objective of the TAs was to increase improved sanitation and hygiene practices and change community behavior to achieve Open Defecation Free (ODF) status at the village level.

Romania aims to be a country in which all citizens are provided with an equal opportunity toparticipate in society, where their basic needs are met and their differences respected, and whereall people feel valued and can live in dignity.Our society is still far from this ideal. One in every five Romanian people is income poor. Most of the people living in relative poverty in Romania are in persistent poverty, meening that they have been in poverty for at least the last three years.

Women make essential contributions to agriculture in developing countries, where they constitute approximately 43 percent of the agricultural labor force. However, female farmers typically have lower output per unit of land and are much less likely to be active in commercial farming than their male counterparts. These gender differences in land productivity and participation between male and female farmers are due to gender differences in access to inputs, resources, and services. In this paper, the authors review the evidence on productivity differences and access to resources.

The objective of this study is to help the government to decide what role safety net and transfer programs should play in the coming 5 to 10 years. It seeks to answer following three questions: (i) can increased spending on transfers accelerate poverty reduction in the medium to long term?; (ii) which groups and aspects of poverty will it make sense to target with transfers?; and (iii) which programs will have the greatest impact at an affordable cost?

Tanzania has made significant economic progress in the recent past, with per capita national income almost doubling from United States (U.S.) 230 dollars equivalent in the late-1990s to U.S. 440 dollars. This report explores the role safety nets and transfers can play in reducing poverty more rapidly in Tanzania. It presents the potential need and costs, to inform a debate of options.