This report summarizes the main outputs
of the technical assistance provided which was concentrated
in three areas: (1) development of MAIL's strategic
priorities and investments for the immediate future/short
term, medium term and longer term; (2) advising Ministry of
Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock (MAIL) regarding the
design of an appropriate structure of the Ministry and
definition of corresponding responsibilities; (3)

This assessment of poverty and
inequality comes at an important juncture for Kenya. The
December 2007 elections and subsequent pronouncements of the
newly formed Grand Coalition have underlined the salience of
these issues to ordinary Kenyans, and for policy makers. The
violence in early 2008 highlighted the importance of
addressing poverty and inequality as major goals in their
own right, but also for instrumental reasons, as major goals

This report is about how to
progressively reduce over time Afghanistan's dependence
on opium - currently the country's leading economic
activity - by development initiatives and shifting economic
incentives toward sustainable legal livelihoods.
Specifically, the report identifies additional investments
and policy and institutional measures to support development
responses that can counterbalance the economic advantages of

Miombo woodlands stretch across Southern
Africa in a belt from Angola and the Democratic Republic of
Congo (DRC) in the west to Mozambique in the east. The
miombo region covers an area of around 2.4 million km. In
some areas, miombo has been highly degraded as a result of
human use (southern Malawi and parts of Zimbabwe), while in
others, it remains relatively intact (such as in parts of
northern Mozambique, and in isolated areas of Angola and the

All countries fund safety net programs
for the protection of their people. Though an increasing
number of safety net programs are extremely well thought
out, adroitly implemented, and demonstrably effective, many
others are not. This book aims to assist those concerned
with social policy to understand why countries need social
assistance, what kind of safety programs will serve those
best and how to develop such programs for maximum

This report explains why agricultural
insurance is expensive to deliver to small farm households,
details risk assessment in four provinces, and recommends
China put more resources in developing products that are
more suited to an agricultural economy that is dominated by
small farm households. The report discusses the important
role of government in supporting the legal and regulatory
environment, access to data for new product development,

This report " Country Social
Analysis (CSA) " focused on ethnicity and development
in Vietnam is a provocative analysis of marginality in
contemporary Southeast Asia. It seeks to understand the
macro social and political processes, and provides an
analysis of how social, political, and cultural factors
influence the opportunities and constraints to more
equitable, inclusive development. This study provides

This study builds a profile of the
status of poverty and vulnerability in Malawi. Malawi is a
small land-locked country, with one of the highest
population densities in Sub-Saharan Africa, and one of the
lowest per capita income levels in the world. Almost 90
percent of the population lives in rural areas, and is
mostly engaged in smallholder, rain-fed agriculture. Most
people are therefore highly vulnerable to annual rainfall

This paper investigates the reasons for
the low application of external fertilizers on farms in
Kenya and Uganda. The analysis uses a large panel of
household data with rich soil fertility data at the plot
level. The authors control for maize seed selection and
household effects by using a fixed-effects semi-parametric
endogenous switching model. The results suggest that Kenyan
maize farmers have applied inorganic fertilizer at the

Doing Business 2007: How to reform is
the fourth in a series of annual reports investigating the
regulations that enhance business activity and those that
constrain it. Doing Business presents quantitative
indicators on business regulations and the protection of
property rights that can be compared across 175
economies-from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe-and over time. This
publication points out how regulations affecting 10 areas of

The agriculture sector has been and will
continue to be important for poverty alleviation efforts in
Indonesia. Indonesia was very successful in increasing
agriculture productivity during the 1970s and up to the
early 1990s, but productivity stagnated during most of the
1990s, partly as a result of declining public investments.
Public spending on agriculture has increased significantly
in the last decade, but a large share of that spending has

Lack of access to electricity is one of
the major impediments to growth and development of the rural
economies in developing countries. That is why access to
modern energy, in particular to electricity, has been one of
the priority themes of the World Bank and other development
organizations. Using a cross-sectional survey conducted in
2005 of some 20,000 households in rural Bangladesh, this
paper studies the welfare impacts of households' grid