With limited land, capital, and a fast
growing population, Burundi's main asset is its
youthful population. Its main challenge is also to create
good quality jobs for its youth. With low levels of
educational attainment and poor health status, the quality
of this young population is poor. After more than 13 years
of conflict ending in 2000, and a period of modest recovery,
Burundi has the opportunity to stimulate growth. Burundi is

This report presents the research
findings of the Justice Delivered Locally (JDL) initiative
of Solomon Islands' Ministry of Justice and Legal
Affairs, which was supported by the World Bank's
Justice for the Poor (J4P) program. JDL supports the Solomon
Islands Government (SIG) policy of reinvigorating
local-level justice systems. This is based on an
understanding that developmentally important local

Motivations behind the extreme brutality
used in many cases of rape in the context of armed conflict
in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) remains poorly
understood and under-researched. This study has been
conducted in partnership with the Non-Governmental
Organization (NGO) vivo international, to determine
individual motivations, as well as strategic or tactical
aspects of sexual violence of different armed groups and

Since economic liberalization in the
early 1990s, India has experienced high economic growth and
made considerable progress in gender equality in areas such
as primary education. However, it fared poorly on
gender-parity in labor force participation (LFP). During the
period between 1993-94 and 2011-12, female labor force
participation rate (LFPR) remained consistently low as
compared to male participation. More alarming is the fact

A disproportionately large number of
Roma in Europe today face deep poverty, social exclusion,
and poor living conditions. Improving these is critical to
achieving the targets of the Europe 2020 Strategy, the
European Union s 10-year growth strategy, which aims to
reduce poverty, social exclusion, early school leaving, and
increase school attainment and employment by 2020. The EU
Framework for National Roma Integration Strategies (NRIS) up

Women play an important role in rural
economic activity but face severe constraints to
productivity and socioeconomic security. Nigeria's
agriculture sector employs 35 percent of women and up to 44
percent of female heads of households. Yet a number of
factors constrain the expansion and diversification of
agricultural activities, including fewer rights to land than
men, lower access to credit, and inequitable access to

The current report is part of the work
on integrating poor areas and marginalized communities in
Romania. Specifically, the Bank's technical assistance
provided through this project focuses on three primary
components: (1) a methodology for defining different types
of urban disadvantaged communities based on a set of key
criteria and indicators; (2) detailed maps that present the
spatial distribution of these indicators and the

This report looks at the growth poles
policy in Romania to determine ways to increase its
effectiveness and efficiency for the next programming cycle
(2014-2020). The growth poles policy in Romania has been
initiated in 2008, as a means to support a balanced economic
development of the country, while still targeting
investments to maximize economic impact. A total of seven
growth poles have been designated and are currently

Despite extremely difficult security conditions, which deteriorated markedly after 2006, the World Bank Group has commendably established and sustained a large program of support to the country. While World Bank Group strategy has been highly relevant to Afghanistan's situation, beginning in 2006 the strategies can have gone further in adapting ongoing programs to evolving opportunities and needs and in programming activities sufficient to achieve the objectives of the pillars in those strategies.

Integrated Development Plans (IDPs) have
been introduced in Romania as a prerequisite for accessing
EU funds under the Regional Operational Program (ROP). The
IDPs designed for growth poles represent a specific category
of strategic planning documents as: 1) they need to be
considered within the frame of the national policy to whose
implementation they contribute; and 2) they represent a
first endeavor to think of development across functional

Across the developing world, public
goods exert significant impacts on the local rural economy
in general and agricultural productivity and welfare
outcomes in particular. Economic and social-cultural
heterogeneity have, however, long been documented as
detrimental to collective capacity to provide public goods.
In particular, women are often under-represented in local
leadership and decision-making processes, as are young

The accumulation of decent housing
matters both because of the difference it makes to living
standards and because of its centrality to economic
development. The consequences for living standards are
far-reaching. In addition to directly conferring utility,
decent housing improves health and enables children to do
homework. It frees up women's time and enables them to
participate in the labor market. More subtly, a home and its