In 2006-07, the Water and Sanitation
Program (WSP) initiated research to identify barriers to
service delivery for the urban poor. The findings of the
research have been presented in the Guidance Notes on
Improving Water Supply and Sanitation Services to the Urban
Poor in India. The Urban Global Practice Team of WSP decided
to expand the ambit of this research to a global context as
the learnings were relevant to experiences across Africa,

Poverty in Pakistan is overwhelmingly
rural. Some two-thirds of Pakistan's population, and
over 60 percent of the country's poor, live in rural
areas. In 2005, average per capita expenditures in rural
areas were 31 percent lower than in urban areas. This
inequality between urban and rural areas is re-enforced by
inequality within and between rural areas. Owing to uneven
access to land and useable water, most of the increased

The Government of Cameroon has declared
poverty reduction through strong and sustainable economic
growth the central objective of its socioeconomic policy.
This paper uses available household survey data to assess
the performance of the economy with respect to this
objective over the period 1996-2007. The authors use
counterfactual decompositions based on both the Shapley
method and the generalized Oaxaca-Blinder framework to

The African Ministers' Council on
Water (AMCOW) commissioned the production of a second round
of Country Status Overviews (CSOs2) to better understands
what underpins progress in water supply and sanitation and
what its member governments can do to accelerate that
progress across countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). AMCOW
delegated this task to the World Bank's Water and
Sanitation Program and the African Development Bank (AfDB),

This briefing note examines perspectives
on trust, authority, and responsibility for decision making
in Timor-Leste, using findings from the justice module
included in an extension of the 2007 Timor-Leste Survey of
Living Standards (TLSLS2) and a review of relevant
social-science literature. It is hoped that this report will
be a valuable resource for civil servants, civil society,
and donor agencies working in Timor-Leste. This note

This paper proposes a parametric
approach to estimating a dynamic binary response panel data
model that allows for endogenous contemporaneous regressors.
This approach is of particular value for settings in which
one wants to estimate the effects of an endogenous treatment
on a binary outcome. The model is next used to examine the
impact of rural-urban migration on the likelihood that
households in rural China fall below the poverty line. In

The situation within the water supply
and sanitation (WSS) sector in Mauritania is somewhat
contradictory: in spite of the weakness of the institutions
in charge of the sector and the lack of financing for
sanitation and, more recently, for the rural water supply
(RWS) subsector, significant improvements have been made in
the access rates since 1990. The institutional reform of the
RWS subsector, notably marked by the implementation of a

The last two decades have witnessed a
growing recognition of the importance of taking cultural and
ethnic diversity into consideration when designing and
implementing development programs. As societies around the
world have become more culturally diverse, and the role
culture plays in the formation of identity has become better
understood, governments are beginning to pay greater
attention to the management of cultural diversity and are

This report addresses the large flood
exposures of Central Europe and proposes efficient financial
and risk transfer mechanisms to mitigate fiscal losses from
natural catastrophes.. The report is primarily addressed to
the governments of the region which should build into their
fiscal planning, the necessary contingent funding
mechanisms, based on their exposures. While there exist
pan-European mechanisms such as the EU Solidarity Fund to

This paper presents counterfactual
decompositions based on both the Shapley method and a
generalization of the Oaxaca-Blinder approach to identify
proximate factors that might explain differences in the
distribution of economic welfare in Cameroon in 1996-2007.
In particular, the analysis uses re-centered influence
function regressions to link the growth incidence curve for
2001-2007 to household characteristics and account for

The objective of this paper is to
present a succinct and up-to-date review of the urban sector
in Egypt, with a focus on issues for which there is new
insight or emerging government interest. The two main themes
of the report are the challenges facing the urban sector and
the policy implications at various levels of government.
Some of the reports mains findings are: urbanization in
Egypt takes on forms and processes which are not well

A number of development partners,
including the World Bank, have been actively supporting the
health sector in Afghanistan since 2003-04 (1382 AC).
Collectively, they invested more than $820 million between
2003 (1382 AC) and 2008-09 (1387 AC) and played key roles in
supporting the government in reshaping the country's
health sector. This support continues, with all partners
starting new projects aimed at further strengthening the