The World Bank has had a long history of
supporting community driven development and urban upgrading
projects in Indonesia, reaching back to the 1970's. The
primary approach of all program nasional pemberdayaana
masyarakat (PNPM) urban projects is to provide block grants
at the kelurahan level to community trusts (BKM) that work
with their communities to identify, plan, and implement
activities (largely infrastructure) to improve urban

Over the past 10 years the government of
Uganda has endeavored to increase latrine coverage and
promote hygiene with a view to improving health outcomes. In
1997, in the Kampala declaration for sanitation, leaders
from all of Uganda's districts pledged to improve
sanitation. Then in 2001, three ministries, the Ministry of
Water, Lands, and Environment; the Ministry of Education and
Sports; and the Ministry of Health, signed a memorandum of

Liberia aims to achieve middle-income
status by 2030 through broad participation and inclusive
growth. The Government's growth strategy aims to
accelerate growth through the exploitation of natural
resources, while maintaining sound macroeconomic policies,
improving the business environment, and prudently allocating
aid and commodity-based financing resources to expand
infrastructure and formal sector employment. However,

Services are failing poor urban and
rural people in the developing world, and poverty remains
concentrated in rural areas and urban slums. This state of
affairs prevails despite prolonged efforts by many
governments to improve rural and urban services and
development programs. This book focuses on how communities
and local governments can be empowered to contribute to
their own development and, in the process, improve

This study was commissioned to analyse
the cost efficiency and economic viability of an ethanol
programme, for reducing disease, and protecting the forests
in Madagascar. This information is also expected to be of
interest regionally and internationally, given that the
World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that there are
nearly two million deaths per annum globally due to
Household Air Pollution (HAP), representing 2.7 percent of

Since 1999, Nigeria has made significant
progress in economic reform. Sound macroeconomic policies,
combined with structural reforms aimed at increasing the
supply responsiveness of the economy, ushered in sustained
high growth, driven by the non-oil economy. The goal of this
book is to shed light on the extent to which Nigeria's
much improved economic performance has impacted the labor
market, and to develop a growth strategy that could enhance

A rather unique panel tracking more than
3,300 individuals from households in rural Kagera, Tanzania
during 1991/4-2010 shows that about one in two
individuals/households who exited poverty did so by
transitioning from agriculture into the rural nonfarm
economy or secondary towns. Only one in seven exited poverty
by migrating to a large city, although those moving to a
city experienced on average faster consumption growth.

The Amazon basin is a key component of
the global carbon cycle. The old-growth rainforests in the
basin represent storage of ~ 120 petagrams of carbon (Pg C)
in their biomass. Annually, these tropical forests process
approximately 18 Pg C through respiration and
photosynthesis. This is more than twice the rate of global
anthropogenic fossil fuel emissions. The basin is also the
largest global repository of biodiversity and produces about

In Japan, the sustainable development of
cities and provinces has been vigorously pursued since the
late 1990s under various programs through the initiative of
the central government and local authorities. In 2009, the
World Bank launched an urban development initiative called
Eco2 Cities: Ecological Cities as Economic Cities (Eco2
Cities Initiative) to help cities in developing countries
achieve greater synergistic ecological and economic

Brazil, China and India have seen
falling poverty in their reform periods, but to varying
degrees and for different reasons. History left China with
favorable initial conditions for rapid poverty reduction
through market-led economic growth; at the outset of the
reform process there were ample distortions to remove and
relatively low inequality in access to the opportunities so
created, though inequality has risen markedly since. By

This paper utilizes the mixed effects
model to measure and decompose spatial disparity in per
capita expenditure in Bangladesh between 2000 and 2010. It
finds a significant decline in spatial disparity in urban
areas and the country as a whole but no substantial change
in rural areas. The decomposition analysis indicates that
average years of education, the percentage of households
with electricity connections, and phone ownership account

Migration has historically been a source
of opportunities for people to improve their lives and those
of their families. Today, the large differences in income
between places-particularly countries-continue to motivate
individuals to escape poverty through migration. The
potential advantages of migration for sending countries are
numerous. Through remittances, migration provides a means of
improving income and smoothing consumption; it enables