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Unveiling Hidden Hardships: Leveraging Alternative Data to Map Multidimensional Vulnerability in the Central African Republic
Full text linkIn fragile states such as the Central African Republic, where conflict and institutional fragility severely constrain traditional data collection, mapping multidimensional vulnerability and potential deprivation poses a significant challenge for designing targeted interventions. This paper presents an innovative geospatial dashboard that harnesses alternative data sources—including nighttime light intensity, other relevant satellite imagery, geocoded infrastructure inventories, and critical event records. It uses the dashboard to develop high-resolution indices (at a 5×5-kilometer scale) of economic capacity, access to essential services (education, health, and water), flood exposure, and lethal conflict risks. By employing a Bayesian state-space model to disaggregate sectoral gross domestic product and friction-based accessibility metrics, the analysis uncovers pronounced spatial disparities. Economic activity remains concentrated in urban hubs such as Bangui, while rural areas suffer from compounded vulnerabilities, including limited economic opportunities and poor service access. Cross-validation with the 2021 Harmonized Household Living Conditions Survey confirms the predictive validity of these indices for household wealth, with economic and service indicators positively correlated with welfare outcomes. Conversely, exposure to lethal conflict appears paradoxically associated with higher-value targets, potentially reflecting rent-seeking dynamics. These tools enhance the precision of policy targeting in data-scarce environments, providing scalable and actionable insights for poverty alleviation in conflict-affected, low-income countries
The Role of Credible Mitigation Measures in Building Citizen Trust for Subsidy Reforms: Lessons from Angola’s Public Opinion Survey
Full text linkThis study explores public opinion for reducing fossil fuel subsidies in Angola, identifies strategies that can shift public opinion, and analyzes variations in support based on respondents’ area of residency and gender. It uses data from a survey of 598 respondents and focus groups involving 30 individuals, conducted in 2024 after the first phase of a fuel subsidy reform. The findings suggest that this initial phase of reforms had significant negative effects on households’ well-being. Support for subsidy reform is low among respondents, around 30 percent, but bundling reforms with mitigation measures is expected to increase public support significantly to nearly 90 percent. This happens when the government intends to use the savings to invest in public infrastructure, stimulate the economy, create jobs, improve access to public services, and provide targeted cash transfers. Mitigation measures appear particularly effective in increasing support among female respondents and those residing in rural areas. The findings also reveal limited public awareness of fuel subsidy policies, low levels of trust in the government, and lack of clarity in government communications. These insights underscore the importance of careful planning, transparent communication, and a comprehensive mitigation package that addresses both short- and longer-term needs to build public support and ensure successful implementation of fuel subsidy reforms
Conflicts and Firm Outcomes: Evidence from the West Bank and Gaza over the Last Decade (2016–25)
No full textThis paper provides novel firm-level evidence—based on an enterprise survey from June 2025—on the impact of conflict exposure on firm performance in a context of chronic instability. The results indicate that, even under persistent conflict conditions, exposure significantly reduces firm sales and the propensity to invest, with the magnitude of the sales effect aligning with prior literature. A key mechanism driving this outcome is conflict-induced power outages, which exhibit an elasticity close to unity and account for roughly one-third of the overall impact of conflict exposure on sales in the West Bank and Gaza. Additionally, smaller firms tend to de-prioritize concerns over taxation and corruption under conflict exposure, whereas larger firms and exporters maintain these concerns and place greater emphasis on access to finance and political instability, respectively
Unlocking Nature for Disaster Resilience: A Policy Guide to Enable Nature-Based Solutions
No full textNature-based solutions (NBS) can help countries facing complex climate-related challenges to address disaster risks while providing important socioeconomic benefits. This guide focuses on NBS for climate resilience and disaster risk reduction (DRR). As such, traditional conservation and restoration practices are also considered NBS if they aim for resilience or DRR while also caring for human well-being. NBS can complement or substitute gray infrastructure and provide multiple benefits, often at lower costs. Investments in NBS can generate employment both during implementation and over the long term, particularly in ecosystem restoration, urban green infrastructure, coastal protection, and DRR activities. Successful implementation and scaling of NBS requires supportive policy frameworks that prioritize the environment and ecosystem-based approaches in multiple sectors. Aligning NBS efforts with broader development goals, such as climate action, DRR, sustainable development, food security, or infrastructure resilience, can facilitate the integration of natural solutions into national cross-sector agendas
Somalia Country Climate and Development Report
No full textThe World Bank Group’s Country Climate and Development Reports (CCDRs) are a core diagnostic that integrates climate change and development. They help countries prioritize the most impactful actions that can reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and boost adaptation and resilience, while delivering on broader development goals. CCDRs build on data and rigorous research and identify main pathways to reduce GHG emissions and climate vulnerabilities, including the costs and challenges as well as benefits and opportunities from doing so. The reports suggest concrete, priority actions to support the low-carbon, resilient transition. As public documents, CCDRs aim to inform governments, citizens, the private sector and development partners and enable engagements with the development and climate agenda. CCDRs feed into other core Bank Group diagnostics, country engagements and operations, and help attract funding and direct financing for high-impact climate action.Despite facing a complex fragility crisis, Somalia has made important progress in state-building and economic recovery, including macroeconomic stabilization, completing the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) process, joining the East African Community (EAC), and elaborating ambitious development objectives to become a middle-income country by 2060. But growth has been constrained by repeated devastating climate disasters, and future climate impacts will intensify and multiply. Mutually reinforcing climate and security crises in rural areas drive unplanned migration to urban areas, displacing vulnerability and driving further social fragility. The challenges are daunting, but not insurmountable. Quality growth could roughly halve the macroeconomic impacts of climate change impacts, and targeted, cost-effective adaptation measures could halve them again. Governance, development, and climate challenges must be addressed in unison. Breaking linkages in the vicious cycle of climate vulnerability and social fragility, and shifting from recurrent expenditure on aid and recovery to sustainable investment, can establish a virtuous cycle of resilience and development. Somalia faces twin climate adaptation challenges: moderating the most severe climate impacts while also supporting growth and diversification into more resilient sectors. To reduce rural vulnerability, which drives displacement, economic dislocation, and social fracturing, it needs to improve disaster risk management (DRM) and resilient rural livelihood systems, and invest in climate-smart cities that capture the growth and diversification potentials of urbanization. In the short term, the government of Somalia will remain highly dependent on external funding and needs to improve the efficiency of its expenditure for resilient development outcomes. To escape dependency on uncertain foreign assistance in the longer term, it will need to extend government climate leadership from coordination to direct implementation and financing, and leverage private sector action
Why and When Water Accounting Matters: A Guidance Note for Operational Task Teams
No full textIncreasing intersectoral competition for limited freshwater, poverty and WASH gaps, and escalating climate risks challenge water resource planning. Symptoms include scarcity, unreliable access, declining quality, groundwater overdraft, and ecosystem degradation, all intensified by climate change. Interventions can produce unintended outcomes when information and assessment frameworks are weak: water may be reallocated away from existing users, “savings” may not materialize, consumption and pumping can rise, return flows and leaks can be double counted, and informal, ecological, and environmental uses can be ignored, often worsening impacts on poor and vulnerable groups. Water accounting helps avoid these pitfalls through systematic, quantitative tracking of water availability, storage, withdrawals, consumption (evaporation/ET), return flows, and sectoral uses within a defined domain. It provides a common framework and language that improves transparency, supports integrated water resources management, and strengthens allocation, policy, and investment decisions. This Guidance Note for World Bank staff and partners explains why and when water accounting is useful for projects in water for food and fiber, river basins, urban water supply, and environmental and ecosystem services. It introduces core concepts, notes the value of tools like Earth observation, and emphasizes institutionalizing water accounting systems - alongside capacity and infrastructure investments to enable long-term monitoring and climate resilience
Residential Energy Use: How Improvements in Residential Energy Use Contribute to Accelerating Access to Clean Air
No full textThis report contributes to the World Bank flagship report “Accelerating Access to Clean Air for a Livable Planet” and focuses on the residential sector energy use. The significance of this report stems from the critical role residential energy use plays in ambient air quality. The dispersed nature of clean cooking and residential space heating make this a challenging area, compound by the scale of the challenge with over 2 billion people globally, lacking access to clean cooking and widespread use of solid fuels in residential heating
Mend the Gap, Unleash Potential: Addressing Barriers in Women’s Economic Opportunities in Europe and Central Asia
No full textThis report takes stock of gender equality in ECA, with a particular focus on women’s
access to economic opportunities and jobs, alongside the urgent challenge of VAWG.
It highlights the World Bank Group–supported initiatives across the region,
illustrating both the range of solutions being deployed and the institution’s
commitment to advancing gender equality as a cornerstone of inclusive growth and
job creation
Who Benefits from Public Spending on Health Care? Longitudinal Evidence from Ethiopia
Full text linkThis study investigates the distribution of benefits from public health care spending in Ethiopia by combining individual health care utilization data from the 2018/19 and 2021/22 waves of the Ethiopia Socioeconomic Panel Survey with regional budget information. It analyzes how health care subsidies and out-of-pocket expenditures are distributed across income groups and rural-urban settings. The results show that, although public health care use and subsidies are generally progressive, they tend to favor wealthier individuals. Further disaggregation by facility type and location over time provides deeper insight into these distributions. Hospital care subsidies are largely pro-rich, while benefits from health centers and posts are strongly pro-poor. Furthermore, rural residents face regressive out-of-pocket costs. However, the longitudinal nature of the data allowed an assessment of temporal changes, showing recent improvement in pro-poorness at primary facilities. Subsidies at health centers and health posts demonstrated an increased pro-poor orientation between 2019 and 2022, which was particularly strong for outpatient and inpatient services in urban areas. The observed trends over time suggest potential to reduce disparities across all service types, including hospital care, through targeted approaches aimed at improving community access to these facilities. These findings have significant implications for equity in health care financing and inform policy priorities aimed at achieving universal health coverage in Ethiopia
Individual Demand for Building State Effectiveness
Full text linkInvestments in public sector workers’ human capital can generate social returns by improving service delivery and state effectiveness. Yet it is unclear whether public workers internalise these broader benefits when making investment decisions. This study elicited willingness-to-pay (WTP) for professional development from Ethiopian public servants and embedded randomised interventions targeting anticipated benefits. Baseline WTP is positive but below implementation costs. Explicitly emphasising private benefits modestly raises demand compared to highlighting societal returns. Implicitly increasing the salience of a supportive managerial environment substantially increases WTP, underscoring the role of perceived organisational norms in public service investment decisions