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On December 27, 2022, the New York Times published an essay I wrote calling for a renaissance in federal rural policy. My motivation for writing the article was borne from a frustration of the media's obsession with rural politics—that is, who in rural America is voting for whom, and why—with little regard or attention to…

In this first season of the "Reimagine Rural" podcast, I talked to local leaders, investors, and small-business owners from rural towns across the U.S. that are making progress amid economic and social change. We don't often hear about what is going right in rural America. The podcast gave me an opportunity to visit bright spots—or…

A review of "Patching Development" by Rajesh Veeraraghavan, with a comparison between state and civil society led accountability efforts for implementation of the rural employment program in India.

By Riccardo Crescenzi (LSE), Fabrizio De Filippis (Roma Tre University), Mara Giua (Roma Tre University) and Cristina Vaquero-Piñeiro (Roma Tre University) Geographical Indications play a propulsive role for local development in rural areas with very limited public expenditure, whereby the locality's features, history and traditions are part of the product itself. They provide protection against reproduction … Continued

Or, as the kids say these days, get gud noob. Douglas Muir here, aka Doug M. Long time commenter, now given the keys. Native New Yorker, trained as a lawyer, work in development — USAID, UNDP, yadda yadda. Married to a German, so living in rural northern Bavaria. Four kids aged high school / uni, […]

Julián Castro, the former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, talks with David Axelrod about why Housing and Urban Development programs are important to rural and urban communities and should be preserved; Donald Trump's strained relationship with the Latino community; the lessons Democrats can learn from 2016; and whether he plans to run for office again.
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Chris Edwards


Congress will consider a new farm bill this year, which will likely be a logrolling extravaganza costing $1.5 trillion or more over the coming decade. Just as Lollapalooza had a diverse lineup of bands, the farm bill will include a diverse lineup of subsidies for farms, food programs, energy, rural programs, forestry, trade, environmental activities, and many other things. Hemp production used to be illegal but now gets subsidized in the farm bill.
In his book on government dysfunction, MSNBC host and former congressman Joe Scarborough described the logrolling frenzy leading to the passage of the 2002 farm bill, which he called the "largest corporate welfare scam in history." He discussed how dairy subsidies were demanded by members from Maine, Pennsylvania, and Vermont, peanut subsidies were demanded by members from Virginia, Alabama, and Georgia, and sugar subsidies were demanded by members from Florida. The logrolling continued for cotton, wheat, wool, mohair, and many other products.
Scarborough concluded, "Standing alone, not one of these corporate welfare measures could survive the bright light of public scrutiny." That is the key point about logrolling. Unfortunately, logrolling is central to the modern legislative process because the government has grown too large to consider individual provisions on their own merits.
Logrolling means that bills jammed full of special‐​interest provisions can gain majority support even if none of the provisions could gain majorities by themselves. Logrolling involves committee chairs or party leaders bundling together narrow subsidies benefiting particular states and interest groups. If democracy means majority support for specific policies, then logrolling undermines democracy.
The problem with logrolling has been observed since at least the mid‐​19th century when omnibus bills bundled dozens of Army Corps of Engineers projects across many states. At the time, people objected that these bills included low‐​value projects that did not have broad support. The federal government is much larger today, and so the logrolling problem is worse, as I discuss here and here.
Here is a June 2023 Congressional Research Service (CRS) report on the upcoming farm bill: "The omnibus nature of the farm bill can create broad coalitions of support among sometimes conflicting interests for policies that individually might have greater difficulty achieving majority support in the legislative process." That is a polite way of saying that if you bundle a bunch of loser provisions together you can end up with a legislative winner.
Farm bill logrolling is becoming more extensive says the CRS:
In recent years, more stakeholders have become involved in the debate on farm bills, including national farm groups; commodity associations; state organizations; nutrition and public health officials; and advocacy groups representing conservation, recreation, rural development, faith‐​based interests, local food systems, and organic production. These factors can contribute to increased interest in the allocation of funds provided in a farm bill.

What can we do about it? The official baseline for the farm bill this year is $1.5 trillion over 10 years. Farm bill leaders in Congress think of the baseline as the minimum pot of money they can carve up and handout to dozens of special‐​interest groups in coming months. But the federal government is hurtling toward a debt crisis, and business as usual is not acceptable. The bipartisan debt‐​ceiling deal passed in May reflected a new priority of controlling red ink. We need belt‐​tightening all around and a much lower price tag than $1.5 trillion for any farm legislation.
I look at logrolling in detail here and here and farm subsidies here.

Global gains in girls' secondary education correspond with declines in early marriage and early childbearing, but this is not transferring to women's employment and leadership. Data from India offer a glimpse into what is holding girls back from the benefits of education.Anita Raj, Tata Chancellor, Professor of Society and Health, and Director of the Center on Gender Equity and Health at UC San Diego, shares results on parental aspirations for children in India. This study was supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Development and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and conducted by UC San Diego, in partnership with India's National Institute of Research on Reproductive Health and Population Council India.A young wife in Junnar Taluka, Maharashtra, India. Photo credit: Charm2 projectTen years ago this week, the International Day of the Girl was established by the UN to prioritize adolescent girls' development, with the initial theme dedicated to ending girl child marriage. At that time, India had the largest number of girls marrying as minors in the world. Girl child marriage prevalence in the country has since been reduced by half — from 45 percent to 22 percent, based on 2005–2006 and 2019–2021 estimates. That's remarkable progress.Keeping girls in secondary school is viewed as a key driver of this reduction. Today, rates of secondary school attendance for Indian girls are high and most recent data indicates the gender gap is closing. In their 2022 Global Gender Gap report, the World Economic Forum ranked India first in terms of women's enrollment in tertiary (higher) education. Nonetheless, the same report showed a national decline in women's equality, largely because of low rates of labor force participation, wage equality, and leadership positioning.The gender gap is worst for adolescent girls and young women in rural areas. Recent data suggests that adolescent boys are five to six times more likely than girls to be employed. This differential is greater for married young people. Young married women also have less control over household earnings than their husbands. Similarly, these young women are less likely than their older peers to report freedom of movement — to go to the market, a health facility, or locations outside of the local community — and less likely than men their age to hold assets such as land or mobile phones, particularly in rural areas.New researchWhat is limiting adolescent girls' transition from secondary education to employment and on to leadership? Data is limited, but traditional gender norms, established early in a girl's development, are likely responsible for the unequal participation and positioning of women in the workplace. The UC San Diego Center on Gender Equity and Health conducted a recent study with couples in a rural district of India that offers some insight into parental expectations on these issues. As part of EMERGE — an open access gender empowerment measurement platform funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Development and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation — the study deployed newly-developed survey measures on parental aspirations for children. The research site reflected a rural, middle class, and largely agricultural population of parents, where education participation for girls and boys is normative but women's employment beyond agriculture is rare.What we foundA gender gap in education aspirations exists at the tertiary education level. While almost all parents aspired for their children to complete secondary education, regardless of the child's gender, parents were more likely to desire a higher education for boy children than girls (54 percent to 46 percent). This gender gap in educational aspirations was more likely to be reported by fathers than mothers.Parents gender the importance of good-paying jobs for their children's futures. Parents largely reported aspirations of college and a good-paying job for their children. However, when asked what is most important to support the happiness and success of a child, separately for girls and boys, parents focused more on good-paying jobs for boys compared to girls (36 percent to 19 percent).No gender gaps in parental aspirations to start families. We found that the majority of parents believed their child should have two children by age 25, regardless of gender. Given strong expectations, in this context, that children should be born in marriage, these aspirations point to a greater chance of young marriages with early childbearing and, consequently, little birth spacing. Interestingly, 18 percent of parents desired no grandchildren from their girl children by age 25, while 20 percent did so for their boy children.What does this mean for girl's leadership?Despite holding more gender equal ideologies and goals regarding the education of their children, parental aspirations for this generation of children are reinforcing traditional norms and gendered expectations. Retention of girls in secondary school may support delayed marriage and first birth, but is not helping girls transition from school to vocation to leadership in a climate of norms that still centralize marriage and family as the follow-up to education.In this context, success for adolescents transitioning to young adults is defined by marriage, and marriage remains an immediate precursor to family creation, mothers' increasing domestic responsibilities, and fathers' increasing pressures for income generation. Would these children choose these lives without the normative expectations and pressures from family and community to marry and procreate? Could there be more space for girls to lead and women to use their education for employment, and for boys to take more space as caregivers for their children, if these norms were reshaped to allow for these choices?To answer these questions, the EMERGE platform has placed more gender norms measures into multinational surveys — in partnership with Afrobarometer, the Violence Against Children Surveys, World Values Surveys, and others — to start assessing and tracking these gendered expectations. We want to determine if in fact transformative change at scale can improve gender empowerment for women and girls. Hopefully, the next decade of progress for the International Day of the Girl will reach beyond indicator advancements to achieve comprehensive, global change for women and girls' full participation and contribution.The value of education for girls' employment and leadership was originally published in CEGA on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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Last year's suggested Holiday Reading was a great success, so here it goes again! The same qualifier applies: the selected readings reflect my own personal tastes rather than any specific external metric. The list is drawn from works published or accepted for publication in 2019. Happy holidays and happy reading!

The year of 2019 was the year of popular BOOKS in Economics. If you have time, pick up Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo's "Good Economics for Hard Times"; or Anne Case and Angus Deaton's "Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism"; or Raghu Rajan's "The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind". While these writings are focused on advanced economies, they serve as a reminder that higher per capita income while necessary, is by no means sufficient for people's well-being – a message that many developing and emerging economies may find relevant these days.

Coming to the more traditional medium of discourse in Economics, journal publications, many of you will want to read "Using Randomized Controlled Trials to Estimate Long-Run Impacts in Development Economics"(Annual Review of Economics 11, 2019) by Bouguen, Adrien, Yue Huang, Michael Kremer, and Edward Miguel. 2019. You will come away with a better understanding of why the 2019 Nobel Prize of Economics went to those promoting the use of RCTs in Economics: Banerjee, Duflo, and Kremer (a coauthor of the above study).

In a different line of work, Melissa Dell, Nathan Lane, and Pablo Querubin examine in "The Historical State, Local Collective Action, and Economic Development in Vietnam" (Econometrica 2019) the importance of institutions for long-run development. By exploiting variation in state conditions across villages within Vietnam and using detailed historical data, they show how institutions affected norms, governance, and economic outcomes centuries after the original institutions disappeared. While the paper makes for captivating reading, it leaves one with a rather pessimistic outlook: how can countries escape the curse of bad institutions they inherited from centuries ago?

A series of other papers look into approaches for promoting development – institutional constraints notwithstanding. In "Disrupting Education? Experimental Evidence on Technology-Aided Instruction in India," (American Economic Review 2019), Karthik Muralidharan, Abhijeet Singh, and Alejandro Ganimian show that technology can be harnessed to improve educational outcomes, especially among academically weaker students.

Another positive message from 2019 is that increased labor mobility contributes to productivity growth. In "The Aggregate Productivity Effects of Internal Migration: Evidence from Indonesia"(Journal of Political Economy, forthcoming), Gharad Bryan and Melanie Morten show that removing barriers to internal migration in Indonesia generates significant, if highly heterogenous, productivity gains.

The optimistic messages of the previous two papers are counterbalanced by the results of two papers that yield rather negative results. In "Experimental Evidence on the Economics of Rural Electrification" (Journal of Political Economy, forthcoming), Kenneth Lee, Edward Miguel and Catherine Wolfram report results from an experiment that randomized the expansion of electric grid infrastructure in rural Kenya. The results are disappointing: demand for connections is much lower than anticipated and among newly connected households, electricity consumption is very low. Overall, the authors find "no meaningful medium-run impacts on economic and non-economic outcomes."

Similarly, the paper "Tourism and Economic Development: Evidence from Mexico's Coastline," by Benjamin Faber and Cecile Gaubert (American Economic Review 2019) slashes the hope of many developing countries that tourism will be their ticket to long-run growth and development. The authors find that tourism provides a boost to the regions directly affected by it; however, the benefits to local communities are offset in the long-run by reductions in agglomeration economies in the rest of the country, so that in the end, the effect of tourism on the country's aggregate growth is negligible.

The above papers demonstrate why research is important! We cannot make progress unless we understand what works, and what does not. Papers showing what has not lived up to expectations are as important as those that document success.

While the international community tries to figure out ways to promote development, in the meantime it is imperative to assist the poor. How do we do this effectively? The paper "The Price Effects of Cash Versus In-Kind Transfers" (Review of Economic Studies, 2019), by Jesse Cunha, Giacomo De Giorgi, and Seema Jayachandran speaks to this question. It compares in-kind to cash transfers to the poor and shows that there are advantages to the former as they lead to lower local prices, especially in less developed villages. The paper's findings are particularly relevant to the World Bank in light of a closely related paper by Deon Filmer, Jed Friedman, Eeshani Kandpal and Junko Onishi on the effects of cash transfers on local prices in remote villages in the Philippines.

To finish on an optimistic note, the paper "Private Outsourcing and Competition: Subsidized Food Distribution in Indonesia" (Journal of Political Economy 2019) by Abhijit Banerjee, Rema Hanna, Jordan Kyle, Benjamin Olken, and Sudarno Sumatro, examines Indonesia's largest transfer program and finds that outsourcing the last mile of food delivery to the private sector reduces operating costs without sacrificing quality. A small step towards increasing efficiency while curtailing rent extraction.

Enjoy! I wish you a very happy 2020 and look forward to next year's research.

















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Pinelopi Goldberg
Former Chief Economist, World Bank Group
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V Baskar


September 09, 2021

You could also come out with a separate list of publications from the studies carried out and reported in the various publications of IMG & WORLD BANK.

Felix Agyemang (Lecturer in Data Science, University of Manchester), Sean Fox (Associate Professor in Global Development, University of Bristol), Rashid Memon (Assistant Professor, Qatar University), and Levi Wolf (Senior Lecturer in Quantitative Geography, University of Bristol) developed a new machine learning algorithm using satellite imagery to identify poor households to receive aid from the Sindh Social Protection Strategy Unit. This study was supported by CEGA's Targeting Aid Better initiative.A woman cooks roti outside her tent | Abdul Majeed, EU Civil Protection and Humanitarian AidIn the summer of 2020, as the COVID pandemic was crushing economies around the world, devastating floods in Pakistan led to hundreds of deaths, left tens of thousands displaced, and damaged hundreds of thousands of homes. In the wake of these disasters, the recently formed Sindh Social Protection Strategy Unit (SPSU) was looking for ways to improve targeting of social protection resources to reach its most vulnerable citizens, particularly in rural areas.Even though half of Sindh's population lives in rural areas, and 37 percent of these live below the national poverty line, a key obstacle was a lack of information about the specific location of the poorest households. This is not uncommon in low- and middle-income countries: half of all countries do not have sufficient data to produce accurate poverty maps. The challenge was especially urgent in Sindh, where the poverty rate in some of the most flood-prone areas is as high as 53 percent.To support the SPSU's response, our team was tasked with developing an approach to rural poverty mapping that could be done quickly and cheaply — without the need for time-consuming and expensive household surveys. Building on recent research, we applied deep learning techniques to satellite imagery and other geospatial data to predict where the poorest households were likely to be found.This approach requires high-quality training data and, fortunately, our partnership with the SPSU provided access to geo-referenced data from a poverty survey covering nearly two million anonymized households across 14 of Sindh's 24 districts. The data were then mapped to grid cells of 1km2.Next, we trained three convolutional neural networks to predict whether the median household in every inhabited grid cell was likely to be chronically poor. The training used the survey data, a locally defined poverty threshold, and three inputs containing important information on local economic geography: daytime satellite imagery from the Copernicus Open Access Hub, nighttime satellite imagery from NASA, and a global map of accessibility. We combined predictions from the three individual neural networks to make a final, ensemble consensus prediction of poverty.To determine the accuracy of our predictions, we used a three-stage validation framework. The first two stages employed "hold-out" validation approaches that work by randomly dropping some of the training data (i.e. the poverty scores of cells from the initial survey) and using the remaining data as validation data. These results were promising.In the third stage, we did something less conventional: We made predictions for cells in a district for which no survey data had been collected, using only satellite imagery and the accessibility map. Working with Gallup, we then surveyed 7,000 new households in that district. This approach to ground-truthing a model is the most robust, and we were relieved (and frankly a bit surprised) to find that the results corroborated our hold-out validation results.Figure 1: Cross-validation performance of Ensemble CNN model in selected districts. Notes: Hits = observed and predicted poor; Misses = observed poor and predicted not poor.Overall, our ensemble deep learning approach was significantly better at identifying cells likely to contain chronically poor households than a simple flip of the coin. Combining this approach with gridded population estimates could provide a cost-effective means of improving geographical targeting at high resolution — and enhance social protection in Sindh.Recently, the SPSU launched an initiative with the World Bank to strengthen social protection that relies on a multidimensional poverty index instead of poverty prevalence estimates. While this approach represents a clear improvement on past targeting processes, it is likely that governments and local NGOs will soon be able to conduct their own rapid, cost-effective poverty assessments at high spatial resolution without the need for large and costly surveys. As machine learning and artificial intelligence evolves rapidly, the rising accuracy of remote prediction of poverty will increasingly offer a viable and robust alternative that expands the suite of tools for fighting poverty worldwide.Using Ensemble Deep Learning to Deliver Aid Better in Post-Flood Pakistan was originally published in CEGA on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On September 28, CEGA hosted its annual Evidence to Action (E2A) conference, this year titled "Realigning Tech for Social Impact." It brought together researchers, policymakers, practitioners, funders, community members, and students to take stock of the benefits and harms technological interventions have had over the last two decades, with an emphasis on the experience of communities in low- and middle-income countries. Sean Luna McAdams, program manager for the Data Science for Development portfolio, shares key takeaways from the event.Carson Christiano (left), Executive Director of CEGA, and Mohamed Abdel-Kader (right), Chief Innovation Officer and Executive Director for the Innovation, Technology, and Research (ITR) Hub at USAID | Matt KrupoffNew technology benefits from a simple and powerful narrative: it can help solve complex problems, often by doing more with less. The printing press accelerated our ability to share information over long distances. Social media has made it nearly costless to communicate with anyone, anywhere in the world. But new technologies can have unintended effects. The cotton gin turbocharged an economic model that relied on enslaved African labor and ill-gotten land, with terrible consequences. More than one account at E2A emphasized this nuance of the effects of technological interventions.Over the course of the day, participants surfaced a set of complementary best practices when designing, testing, and integrating tech into existing policy, governance, and social welfare systems. The first speaks to the limits of expertise: a technically excellent product is necessary but not sufficient for social impact. Additionally, the ultimate goal of scaling a solution is often underspecified. Scaled by whom, for which communities, and at what scale (national, regional, global)? Making these answers explicit can improve estimates of the trade-offs to scaling and ensure the technological solution is the right fit for its intended problem.Beyond Technical ExcellenceAt E2A, the best examples of technology improving lives and achieving large-scale adoption in low- and middle-income countries relied on interdisciplinary teams, incorporated community input, and planned for maintenance and capacity building to ensure sustainability. Interventions developed with these elements can cultivate community trust, clarify their value proposition for potential users, and dynamically adapt and improve their product. Dan Fletcher, Professor of Bioengineering and Faculty Director at the Blum Center at UC Berkeley, reflected that the initial prototype of Cellscope failed during field testing despite its technical excellence because it was developed only by engineers. Subsequent iterations involved experts from the social sciences, improving the product and leading to greater success.Cellscope is a mobile phone-based microscopy tool that helps health workers identify a variety of pathogens to more quickly diagnose and treat those affected and test the potability of water. | Cellscope teamHowever challenging, collaboration across disciplines is essential for successful interventions. Mohamed Abdel-Kader, Chief Innovation Officer and Executive Director for the Innovation, Technology, and Research (ITR) Hub at USAID, reminded us of the value of proactively including people "whose lived experience can provide different perspectives." For USAID, this means ensuring that 25 percent of its funding is dispersed to local organizations. Daanish Masood, Advisor on AI Alignment at the UN's Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, echoed this call by highlighting the importance of "epistemological pluralism" to more effectively engage community members who often perceive and value their world using different frameworks. By bringing together multidisciplinary teams, innovators can develop technologies that will better meet the social reality in which they will be deployed.Not only does diversity make technology more effective, it also helps to minimize potential harm. For example, Josh Blumenstock shared how his team gathered input from rural communities in Togo to inform the development of a social transfer targeting software his team co-created with the Ministry of Digital Economy and Transformation. Zoe Kahn, a PhD student on Blumenstock's team in Togo, conducted ethnographic research to better understand how members of rural communities would interact, understand, and appraise the digital social transfer system they were building.Finally, technically excellent solutions must build the social consensus and requisite buy-in across different contexts to tailor and maintain these tools iteratively. This requires planning for the long-term, building in plans for deprecation, and creating institutions — whether private companies, volunteer-based organizations, or capacity-building initiatives — to maintain and update these innovations to make them sustainable over the long-run.What Does Success Look Like?We should not assume that we have the same vision of a successful technological innovation in the social impact space. We often tout "scaling" as the final life stage of tech; for many, it serves as the ultimate goal and proxy of success. Yet, Brigitte Hoyer Gosselink, Director of Product Impact at Google.org, distinguished two paths to integrating technological interventions: a tailored, individualized solution in close partnership with a decision maker and centralized, replicable systems that can be deployed across time and space reliably.Our Technology Adoption for the Public Good panel delved into the public sector's challenges and opportunities in helping to scale proven solutions. | Matt KrupoffShould a technological intervention in global development be global in scope? We need a better sense of the trade-offs in scaling up from local to global to answer this question empirically. Some systems may be better suited to function at national or regional scales. Collaborators should plan to measure performance reliably across scale to tailor solutions accordingly.As Jane Munga, Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, reminded us: even if we develop good tech solutions for citizens who have a mobile phone and access to the internet now, there is a sizable portion of the world's most underserved who would be excluded due to lack of access. We need to expand the size of the pie, improve the quality of its ingredients, and increase the diversity of the culinary team that bakes it. Digital technology has a role to play in achieving more equitable social and economic development world-wide. How transformative that development will be depends on us.Technology Is Not a Panacea, but It Can Help Solve Specific Problems was originally published in CEGA on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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Raufu Alaka, chief in the fishing village of Orimedu (Lagos State). © Photo: Arne Hoel, World Bank






















Digital technologies offer new avenues for economic growth in Africa by accelerating job creation, supporting access to public services and increasing productivity and innovation. However, major challenges remain. The lack of connectivity in remote and rural regions and the low use of digital technologies in connected areas is further disadvantaging the poor, women, and small businesses. Increased cyber risks and lack of data protection have brought new risks and vulnerabilities to businesses, governments, and people.

Government policies and regulations are key to enable greater use of digital services while mitigating risks. But how to intervene in a timely manner in a changing technological environment? Agile enabling regulations are needed to quickly respond to market developments, facilitating entry of new competitors for the benefit of consumers. In Kenya, collaboration between the competition authority, the central bank and the telecom regulator allowed digital financial service providers to access telecom services to offer mobile money services along mobile network operators. Consumers benefitted with greater availability of options for mobile payments. Later, the collaboration also facilitated interoperability between mobile money providers and banks, allowing consumers to seamlessly transfer funds between providers, top up saving accounts or use digital credit.

Such new approach is required to support the development of agile and collaborative regulations. A shift from planning and controlling to piloting and implementing policies in a multi-stakeholder setting for rapid feedback and iteration is necessary. Feedback loops allow policies to be evaluated against the backdrop of the broader ecosystem to determine if they are still meeting citizens' values and needs and considering the impact on the industry and private participation. To implement this approach, a change of mindset is first needed. This approach is particularly appropriate for dealing with digital transformation, which by its nature is changing and evolving, and would otherwise be hampered by rigid policies and regulations.

Some African countries are already implementing agile regulation principles to address various issues. Ghana and South Africa responded swiftly to COVID pandemic demand for higher bandwidth by quickly adjusting current regulations and made it easy for companies to offer higher bandwidth to citizens. Kenya and Zimbabwe were quick to remove roadblocks and supported the roll-out of applications that allowed citizens to quickly access mobile money transfers and other financial apps. The African Union has consulted perspectives from businesses, civil society and academia to develop policy frameworks on data and on digital identities. This inclusive multi-stakeholder approach resulted in workable frameworks that encourage innovation through data sharing and cross-border data flows for African eCommerce while protecting rights of individuals. These African Union frameworks on data and on digital identities are important cornerstones to build an African Digital Single Market – the vision of the Smart Africa Alliance that is endorsed by all members of the African Union.

The African Union's Agenda 2063 envisions a people-driven development for Africa, relying on the potential of African people, especially its women and youth. That's why digital skills are prioritized in the African Union Digital Transformation Strategy 2020-2030, where the goal is to "build inclusive digital skills and human capacity across the digital sciences […] and technology policy & regulation". African leaders recognize the pivotal role of policies and regulations in shaping societal and business practices and - if done correctly – how policies can support and encourage digital transformation.

German Development Cooperation and the Digital Development Partnership of the World Bank, in partnership with Smart Africa, have started piloting this agile approach under the Agile Regulation for Digital Transformation program (AReg4DT), a program linked to the Smart Africa Digital Academy, the digital skills vehicle for Smart Africa, and atingi - an online learning platform developed by GIZ, the implementing organization of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Development and Cooperation. The pilot is equipping policymakers and regulators in Africa with the knowledge and tools to regulate digital markets in Africa to support digital transformation. The results so far have been promising with a combination of online and face-to-face training events to allow for learning and knowledge exchange within and for Africa. This partnership is testing the development of capacity building activities in an agile and iterative way and tailoring the content to the local context, as well as gaining a practical understanding about implementation challenges and the training ecosystem in Africa. Prof. Dr. Yeboah-Boateng from Ghana's National Communications Authority also appreciated the chance for peer-to-peer exchange during the event in Abidjan. In particular, he noted the "value of better harmonization of policies and regulations across Africa that would benefit the continent as a whole."








Regulators across the world are developing and testing new policies and regulatory tools, while also adapting existing ones for new purposes, particularly in face of the COVID pandemic. In many cases, the same technologies that challenge traditional regulation also offer many opportunities to reinvent rule making, oversight, inspections, and enforcement.

The AReg4DT program supports the implementation of the Digital Economy for Africa (DE4A) initiative and aims at facilitating regional integration through a common understanding of challenges, opportunities and solutions that can be implemented at the national and regional level, thereby ushering Africa, into the dawn of the single digital market.









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Boutheina Guermazi
Director for Regional Integration for Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, World Bank
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Birgit Pickel
Director-General for Africa in the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ)
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Lacina Kone
Director General and Chief Executive Officer, Smart Africa
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Nurses in Sri Lanka attend to their work. Photo: Dominic Sansoni/World Bank






















The COVID-19 pandemic is prompting a fresh look at options to ensure reliable power for health facilities , including the Vavuniya General Hospital in Sri Lanka's Northern Province. In line with an overall push to boost the share of renewables, the government of Sri Lanka is pursuing new power solutions for Vavuniya and about 20 other hospitals across the nation.

The World Bank is assisting as part of a multi-sectoral pandemic response in Sri Lanka. Similar initiatives are underway in other countries around the world, including Afghanistan, Madagascar, and Nigeria, to name a few.

Parts of a solution

Distributed photovoltaics (DPV), installed on rooftops or open spaces near buildings, are proliferating as a low-cost option for emergency power supplies. Many developing countries already use DPV as a long-term primary or secondary power source for health care facilities in rural and urban settings. While operating costs are minimal, average investment costs are dramatically lower today than even a few years ago, making DPV more economically attractive. When coupled with batteries, which are also becoming cheaper, DPV systems can contribute to reliable power around the clock.

With these solutions, diesel generators can become more of a last resort, instead of being the main or only source of essential back-up power when the grid is unavailable. Less use of diesel generators helps avoid the high cost of fuel, vulnerability to shortages, and toxic emissions.

Diverse technology options are available for distributed renewables. They range from individual components to pre-packaged "box" solutions which combine DPV, batteries and generators of varying sizes, including up to mini-grid level for larger sites. Under the auspices of the Energy Storage Partnership facilitated by the World Bank, a survey of suppliers has found that significant inventory is available despite logistics disruptions.

Electrical devices are also increasingly available in more energy efficient models, which can help avoid oversized power systems in new health care units. Correct system sizing is crucial where financial resources are limited, but many variables need to be considered.

For example, the electricity needs of intensive care units (ICU) differ greatly depending on how many beds are occupied: temporary ICU wards need significant power, but only for a limited time period. Another key factor to consider is that electricity demand from certain medical services may drop while stay-at-home measures are in force. For instance, some hospitals are deferring elective surgeries during the crisis. System sizing strategies need to examine such factors when addressing the health care sector's power needs in response to the pandemic.

Bringing the parts together

Given all the options, what tools are available to design power solutions for hospitals without full grid electricity? One resource is the HOMER Powering Health Tool, a free online model to help simplify the design process for distributed generation systems for health care facilities. Standing for Hybrid Optimization Model for Multiple Energy Resources, HOMER is a leading resource for mini-grid analyses.

Originally commissioned for USAID's Powering Health program, the HOMER Powering Health Tool has recently been updated to reflect typical COVID-19 response needs with support from the World Bank's Energy Sector Management Assistance Program (ESMAP). Users enter the electrical needs manually or select default values for pre-listed devices from one of four health facility tiers as a starting point. The tiers include, for example, a small rural dispensary that would typically screen and refer serious cases to larger facilities such as a district hospital. Based on user inputs, the tool calculates least-cost combinations of batteries, PV, and diesel generators sets – including as back-up to grid electricity if this is available for some hours each day.

The tool runs entirely online and can be used an unlimited number of times with no need to sign in or to download a software. It's kept simple for non-specialists to use without requiring special training. This comes with limitations, of course. For certain advanced needs, other products are available, such as the full, licensed software of HOMER Energy by UL or the free System Advisor Model (SAM) of the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). The latter is especially useful for systems that may feed DPV power to the grid when it is not needed on site. In Sri Lanka, the World Bank is applying these tools to optimize solutions to strengthen power for Vavuniya and other hospitals.

From one to many

With a standard lifetime of 20 years, DPV systems can supply clean energy to the national grid. They can also become the backbone of community mini-grids. The value of both options goes well beyond the pandemic. DPV can help not only the consumers who host the systems but also a power system that it feeds. DPV can reduce grid congestion and energy losses for utilities. It can also displace more costly generation from wholesale sources while promoting resilience.

Sri Lanka has already been promoting DPV such as through its Rooftop Solar Power Generation Project, in partnership with the Asian Development Bank. Nationwide, rooftop installations are on track to reach a total of 200 megawatts capacity by the end of 2020, equivalent to around 7 percent of system peak demand. Northern Province alone has added over 3 megawatts since 2017, including 17 projects in Vavuniya for businesses and households. Consumers with DPV can choose to feed some or all the power generated into the national grid through the utility providers. In all cases, the DPV significantly reduces consumers' bills while providing clean energy to the system at a lower cost than fuel-based generation for grid.

Sri Lanka's initiative shows that solutions to the current crisis can also address longer-term challenges. With a strategic approach, health care facilities can be well-positioned to combat COVID-19 while preparing for the "new normal."

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https://www.linkedin.com/in/alandlee/




Alan David Lee
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Andrea Arricale
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On August 20, Guatemala's anti-corruption candidate Bernardo Arévalo of the center-left Movimiento Semilla party won a resounding victory against establishment favorite Sandra Torres of the National Unity of Hope party (Unidad Nacional para la Esperanza) in the presidential run-off. Arévalo secured a 58 percent to 37 percent victory over Torres, obtaining the majority of votes in 17 of the Central American country's 22 departments, including a number of rural and indigenous communities. The new president is expected to take office on January 14.Arévalo's unexpected rise and landslide victory were a strong repudiation of the corrupt and entrenched interests that have ruled the country for decades. His triumph is a major triumph for Guatemala's democracy and offers an opportunity to tackle widespread corruption and restore the rule of law. The vote in Central America's most populous nation also marks an important victory against the wave of authoritarianism that has swept the region in recent years.The road ahead, however, will be rough. The country's political establishment appears set on using everything in its arsenal to disqualify Semilla and annul Arevalo's victory to maintain their grip on power.Challenging Road to TransitionOn August 28, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal certified Bernardo Arévalo's victory proclaiming him Guatemala's next president, and the outgoing president, Alejandro Giammattei promised an orderly and transparent transition of power. But an orderly transition remains far from certain as Semilla and Arévalo continue to face a wave of legal battles in attempts to block his rise to power.Despite Arévalo's resounding victory, the country's attorney general, Consuelo Porras, who was named to a second term by Giammattei and has been the subject of U.S. sanctions due to corrupt and undemocratic activities, is determined to push ahead with spurious cases against Semilla and election officials. Following the presidential run-off, her office also requested that charges be brought against election officials and has demanded the list of election workers.The threats do not stop there. Hours before the August 28 certification of results, the electoral registry, under mounting threats of prosecution, suspended Semilla pending further investigation, in violation of court orders that ostensibly protected the party until October 31, when the electoral process officially ends. Two days later, the leadership in Congress, led by the governing party, stripped Semilla's legislators of their party status; the move bars the party's current and incoming lawmakers from serving on committees or as part of the leadership. Given several credible threats to their lives, including two assassination plots, one involving state actors, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights issued a resolution calling for protective measures on behalf of Arévalo and his running mate, Karin Herrera. The resolution also noted repeated threats presumably coming from individuals linked to the attorney general's office.Porras has not commented on the assassination plots but, instead, unsuccessfully filed a motion before the Constitutional Court asking for protection measures of her own and denouncing posts on social media calling for her resignation, including from journalists.At the same time, Arevalo's rival, Sandra Torres, has refused to concede, and has filed a complaint alleging fraud in the vote count. However, the electoral observation missions of the Organization of American States and the European Union have validated the results, and several countries, including the United States, have recognized Arévalo's victory.Post Inauguration ChallengesPresuming the establishment's efforts fail and Arévalo can assume office on January 14, he will face steep challenges.He will confront a strong opposition in Congress dominated by clientelist and hardline right-wing parties. Semilla obtained 23 out of 160 seats. If the establishment succeeds in permanently suspending Semilla's legal standing, Arévalo will be left without a party bloc in Congress to help advance his legislative agenda.Moreover, the establishment will continue to exercise power through the courts and the public prosecutor's office, both of which have been stacked with its allies. By law, Porras, the attorney general, will remain in office until 2026 and will likely remain hostile to the incoming administration. Those who have profited from the status quo will fight him tooth and nail.Despite these challenges, there are reasons to be hopeful. Arévalo and Semilla are genuinely committed to democratic values and tackling systemic corruption. The path forward will require careful collaboration and agreements with other sectors, including members of the private sector who share their goals and are open to supporting needed reforms, as well as with civil society.Addressing the country's deep inequalities will require working with indigenous organizations and leaders and ensuring they have a seat at the table. Arévalo will also need to rely on the support of the international community. More important, he enjoys the support of an important segment of the citizenry that is eager for change and a better future. Managing their expectations will be critical to his success.US PolicyTwo years ago, the Biden administration launched a five-point, $400-million strategy to tackle the underlying causes of irregular migration from the region, but Central American governments have been reluctant to cooperate. The independent journalists, civil society activists, and other independent actors the U.S. has supported through the strategy have been the target of attacks, threats, and spurious charges by the region's governments, forcing many into exile. The Biden administration's relationship with the Giammattei government has been difficult as, at times, it has felt the need to cooperate on immigration enforcement matters, while, at others, it has sanctioned Guatemalan public officials due to corruption concerns.Arévalo's victory opens up new possibilities for the Biden administration. The president-elect understands the deep ties between both countries and is keen on developing a shared agenda with the United States. The U.S. is Guatemala's most important economic partner, and an estimated 20 percent of the country's GDP comes from remittances.He has vowed to improve basic services — education, health, access to water, and infrastructure — as well as to purge state institutions coopted by corrupt interests. He has promised to focus development efforts on the rural areas that have been most abandoned by the government. Almost half of Guatemalans live in poverty, and that rate rises to 80 percent among indigenous peoples, who make up over 40 percent of the country's 14.9 million people. Child malnutrition is one of the highest in the world, with nearly half of children under five suffering from chronic malnutrition, 58 percent among indigenous children.The Biden administration is likely to continue pressing for border enforcement cooperation, an issue that Arévalo seems to acknowledge and has signaled an openness to working on with the U.S. government.The Biden administration should view Arévalo's victory as an opportunity to revamp its Central America Root Causes Strategy and offer its political, technical, and financial support to help him succeed. First, it must continue to work with other countries in the OAS Permanent Council to exert pressure on the current Guatemalan authorities, as it did after the first round in the elections in June, to ensure that the will of the Guatemalan people is respected and that Arévalo is able to assume office and carry out his democratic mandate.

This post was authored by Leonie Rauls (J-PAL) and was originally posted on the J-PAL website.T.K. Kurikawa via Shutterstock.comThe climate crisis is one of the many factors contributing to rising global food insecurity and threatening farmer livelihoods. To complicate matters, farmers are also faced with navigating changes such as innovations in technology, evolving market structures, and new food standards. As such, they may no longer be able to rely on the same tools, knowledge, or experience that previously worked in their contexts. They need updated information that is accurate, tailored, easily accessible, and that aligns with their business priorities. J-PAL's updated Policy Insight reviews strategies to improve information dissemination to help farmers make optimal production decisions and investments to improve their livelihoods.Challenges in reaching farmers with informationFarmers access production information from many different sources, but information has traditionally been shared with farmers through government-led agricultural extension programs. These services, typically organized by agricultural ministries, consist of delivering trainings, field visits, or farmer field schools to large groups of farmers in rural areas with the goal to encourage them to adopt technologies and optimize their production practices. However, many extension systems face challenges with staff capacity and accountability to reach all farmers reliably. In addition, extension programs are designed to make recommendations that maximize yields. They often base their recommendations about which technologies to use on experimental evidence from tests of technologies under relatively controlled environments rather than under a variety of real-world conditions. As such, these recommendations do not often reflect farmers' incentives to maximize profits, as many of the practices designed to increase productivity require upfront costs that are not always recouped when farmers sell their crops at harvest.This mismatch in priorities results in low uptake of recommended technologies and highlights the urgency to better tailor extension services to farmers' actual needs and local conditions, particularly in rapidly changing environments where best practices are evolving.The Agricultural Technology Adoption Initiative (ATAI) is a joint research initiative with J-PAL and the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA), funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the UK Foreign, Commonwealth, & Development Office. Since 2009, ATAI-funded research has shown that despite the promise of agricultural technology to boost productivity and transform agricultural livelihoods, adoption of technology remains low. One such barrier farmers face in deciding whether to adopt a new practice or technology is a lack of access to timely and relevant information on how to best utilize and reap the greatest benefit from the technology in question.New insights on how to better tailor and deliver information to help farmers adopt productive technologiesResearchers have tested interventions that help farmers better access information to assess the suitability of new technologies and make optimal farming decisions. In our updated Policy Insight, we reviewed 41 randomized evaluations — eighteen of which were funded by ATAI — that showed that the content, frequency, and channel by which information is disseminated plays an important role in a farmer's decision to adopt a new technology. Providing farmers with information through extension services does help farmers make informed decisions about what technology to adopt, but these services do not always reach all farmers or do not deliver information that has been tailored to local contexts or production requirements. Strategies like harnessing a farmers' local network, incorporating simple tools, and leveraging information and communication technologies (ICTs), can improve the effectiveness of information dissemination.Peer farmers, who serve as role models and can draw on local knowledge to tailor extension messaging, can encourage farmers to adopt new or improved technologies. They are particularly effective when extension agents face low capacity and when trust in recommendations from more formal channels is low.Providing farmers with tools that simplify the use of complex technologies, like pit planting, charts to monitor plant needs through leaf color tracking, or a spoon to measure the optimal fertilizer amount, are another effective strategy to increase the uptake of improved farming practices.Incorporating ICTs, such as SMS, into extension services can help organizations deliver frequent reminders and tailored information to farmers at particular points during production and harvest. Videos are another innovative tool to deliver technical information consistently and in a digestible manner, especially in areas where literacy rates are low.While farmers seem to learn from information and adjust their production decisions accordingly, this does not consistently lead to improvements in their yields or profits. This may be because the information originally shared with them was irrelevant, the technology promoted was ill suited for the farmers targeted, or the recommendations shared prioritized increasing yields over profits. As such, policymakers should do more to ensure that the technologies selected, the information defined, and the delivery mechanisms are relevant and well-aligned with local conditions and farmer priorities.Timely, relevant, and accurate information is keyAs climate change and other factors accelerate the development of innovative technology and practices, it is critical that farmers know what tools are available to them, how to best use them, and what benefits or costs they should expect from adoption. With better access to timely, relevant, and accurate information farmers in low- and middle-income countries will be better equipped to combat rising food insecurity across the globe.Tailoring information to increase technology adoption among farmers was originally published in CEGA on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.