Strategy Paper 1: Reflecting on practice – Lessons from international and South
African experiences of rural development.
Strategy Paper 2: The rural development context in the Northern Cape
Strategy Paper 3: Critical success factors for rural development in the Northern Cape.
Strategy Paper 4: Draft Northern Cape Rural Development Strategy – Activities and
Outcomes
Strategy Paper 5: Draft Northern Cape Rural Development Strategy - Institutional
Options

The review examines evolving ideas and approaches to rural development internationally from the 1950's to 2000s. It examines how the history of rural development in South Africa is embedded in the larger narrative of colonial land dispossession and the implementation of apartheid policies of separate development. It examines the various policy iniatives post 1994 relating to land reform, agriculture and rural development.

Analysis of land allocation strategies in irrigated agriculture schemes in West Africa yields lessons which can guide the design and implementation of current and forthcoming projects. Allocation of insufficient land makes the main purposes of large dam projects – to combat poverty and to increase national cereal production – more difficult to achieve. Research by the Global Water Initiative (GWI) at three dam project sites in West Africa shows that the area of land allocated per family is usually about 1 hectare (ha).

This report shows that while more inclusive growth is the ultimate solution to poverty in Lesotho, the country can and should use selective social transfers to reduce poverty more rapidly among the extreme poor. But because the majority of the transfers are received by people who are not among the extreme poor there is room for increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of spending on safety nets which. These programs should be productive and concentrate on the extreme poor Basotho.

This report focuses on areas with highest potential efficiency gains to increase the value for money from investments in core public goods and services such as extension, irrigation and rural roads. This is a first attempt to carry out such an analysis in Cambodia, and even in the Greater Mekong sub-region. Based on extensive data gathering and surveys, this chapter analyzes the efficiency and effectiveness of agricultural sector expenditures in Cambodia and assesses various options for increasing the impact of government expenditures on agricultural growth.

In countries where a large proportion of the total land area is held customarily, reform questions around land and development often tend to focus on the customary estate. Evidence from Solomon Islands suggests that a focus on public land holdings, even when they are relatively small in land area, can yield outsized benefits. Publicly owned land regularly includes economically valuable land and urban land on which development pressure is high. In Solomon Islands, as much as 10 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) may be affected by how effectively urban public land is governed.

The objective of this study is to help the government to decide what role safety net and transfer programs should play in the coming 5 to 10 years. It seeks to answer following three questions: (i) can increased spending on transfers accelerate poverty reduction in the medium to long term?; (ii) which groups and aspects of poverty will it make sense to target with transfers?; and (iii) which programs will have the greatest impact at an affordable cost?

Inexorable urbanization and formalization have been the expectations in development discourse. Indeed, measures of urbanization and formalization have been provided and used as indicators of development. But while urbanization has proceeded apace in developing countries, formalization has slowed significantly over the past quarter century. These disconnect raises questions for development analysis and development policy. Why did one expect urbanization and formalization to go together in the first place?

In the past 50 years, Indian agriculture has undergone a major transformation, from dependence on food aid to becoming a consistent net food exporter. The gradual reforms in the agricultural sector (following the broader macro-reforms of the early 1990s) spurred some unprecedented innovations and changes in the food sector driven by private investment. These impressive achievements must now be viewed in light of the policy and investment imperatives that lie ahead.

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 environs affect identity and self-respect.

This report responds to a request from the Government of Timor-Leste (GoTL) and Dr. Mari Alkatiri. The request was for World Bank assistance to collaborate on a range of studies relating to opportunities in the special economic zone, including community development, trade and competitiveness, and regional integration. The analysis builds on a situation analysis prepared by the Zona Especial de Economia Social de Mercado (ZEESM) authority in March 2014.

This report summarizes the results, lessons and recommendations to the Government of Lao PDR from two Technical Assistance projects (TA) “Supporting Demand Creation for Sanitation through Community Led Total Sanitation” and “Sanitation Marketing in Lao PDR” carried out by the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Program between October 2012 and December 2015. The development objective of the TAs was to increase improved sanitation and hygiene practices and change community behavior to achieve Open Defecation Free (ODF) status at the village level.