The World Bank is a vital source of financial and technical assistance to developing countries around the world. We are not a bank in the ordinary sense but a unique partnership to reduce poverty and support development. The World Bank Group has two ambitious goals: End extreme poverty within a generation and boost shared prosperity.
- To end extreme poverty, the Bank's goal is to decrease the percentage of people living on less than $1.25 a day to no more than 3% by 2030.
- To promote shared prosperity, the goal is to promote income growth of the bottom 40% of the population in each country.
The World Bank Group comprises five institutions managed by their member countries.
The World Bank Group and Land: Working to protect the rights of existing land users and to help secure benefits for smallholder farmers
The World Bank (IBRD and IDA) interacts primarily with governments to increase agricultural productivity, strengthen land tenure policies and improve land governance. More than 90% of the World Bank’s agriculture portfolio focuses on the productivity and access to markets by small holder farmers. Ten percent of our projects focus on the governance of land tenure.
Similarly, investments by the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the World Bank Group’s private sector arm, including those in larger scale enterprises, overwhelmingly support smallholder farmers through improved access to finance, inputs and markets, and as direct suppliers. IFC invests in environmentally and socially sustainable private enterprises in all parts of the value chain (inputs such as irrigation and fertilizers, primary production, processing, transport and storage, traders, and risk management facilities including weather/crop insurance, warehouse financing, etc
For more information, visit the World Bank Group and land and food security (https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/agriculture/brief/land-and-food-security1
Resources
Displaying 276 - 280 of 4907Roads and Rural Development in Sub-Saharan Africa
This paper assesses the relation between
access to markets and cultivated land in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Making use of a geo-referenced panel over three decades
(1970-2005) during which the road network was significantly
improved, the analysis finds a modest but significant
positive association between increased market accessibility
and local cropland expansion. It also finds that cropland
expansion, in turn, is associated with a small but
On the Central Role of Small Farms in African Rural Development Strategies
Improving the productivity of
smallholder farms in Sub-Saharan Africa offers the best
chance to reduce poverty among this generation of rural
poor, by building on the limited resources farming
households already possess. It is also the best and shortest
path to meet rising food needs. Using examples from
farmers' maize and rice fields, and comparisons with
Asia, this paper examines why the set of technologies
Financial Regulation and Government Revenue
Financial regulation affects government
revenue whenever it imposes both the mandatory quantity and
price of government bonds. This paper studies a banking
regulation adopted by the National Bank of Ethiopia in April
2011, which forces all private banks to purchase a fixed
negative-yield government bond in proportion to private
sector lending. Having access to monthly bank balance
sheets, a survey of branch costs and public finances
Social Inclusion in Macro-Level Diagnostics
The idea of social inclusion has
garnered considerable attention, especially in the context
of two recent developments: the Sustainable Development
Goals and the heightened attention to inequality. This paper
reviews the manner and extent to which social inclusion is
addressed in the first 17 Systematic Country Diagnostics
(SCDs), which are ex ante, country-level assessments
conducted by the World Bank Group, ahead of the preparation
Social Capital, Trust, and Well-being in the Evaluation of Wealth
This paper combines theory with data
from different domains to provide an empirical analysis of
the scale and variability of social capital as wealth. The
analysis is used to argue, given what has been learned from
the literature on social capital, that the welfare returns
to investing in trust could be substantial. Using data from
132 nations covered by the Gallup World Poll, the paper
presents a range of estimates of the wealth-equivalent