“If everybody’s reading poetry, it’s probably not doing its job. I don’t think it can or ever should be a frontline, popular art form. If it was, I wouldn’t be interested in it. The poetry I will always like sounds like a version of people talking, or singing, or praying. I’ve always thought of it as alternative, not a mainstream activity: a kind of refuge. It’s never been the new rock ‘n’ roll, or the new stand-up comedy or whatever else it’s supposed to have been. It’s still an art form of dissent – to the extent that it even refuses to get to the end of the page. It’s unbiddable!”
Abaarso was founded in 2009 as a not-for-profit school in Somaliland. Today, there are over 80 Abaarso students studying abroad, including at such prestigious institutions as Harvard, Yale, and MIT. (Photo: Abaarso School)
60 Minutes, The New York Times, MSNBC, BBC, and CNN are just some of the media outlets that have covered the story of Abaarso School in Somaliland. Abaarso is also the subject of a recently released book, It Takes A School, and an upcoming documentary, Somaliland, The Abaarso Story. All this attention is the result of Abaarso’s extraordinary success, despite conventional wisdom believing Abaarso’s results were impossible anywhere, never mind in the unrecognized breakaway country of Somaliland. Given Abaarso’s achievements and modest price tag, its approach is worth a deeper dive for lessons that can be applied elsewhere.
The transport sector is changing at breakneck speed.
By 2030, global passenger traffic is set to rise by 50%, and freight volume by 70%. By 2050, we will have twice as many vehicles on the road, with most of the increase coming from emerging markets, where steady economic expansion is creating new lifestyle expectations and mobility aspirations. Mega-projects like China’s One Belt, One Road could connect more than half of the world’s population, and roughly a quarter of the goods that move around the globe by land and sea.
These transformations create a unique opportunity to improve the lives and livelihoods of billions of people by facilitating access to jobs, markets, and essential services such as healthcare or education.
But the growth of the transport sector could also come at the cost of higher fossil fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions, increasing air and noise pollution, a growing number of road fatalities, and worsening inequities in access.
Although these are, of course, global challenges, developing countries are disproportionately affected.
While the case for sustainable mobility is evident, the sector still lacks coherence and clear objectives. There is a way forward, but it requires pro-active cooperation between all stakeholders.
That’s what motivated the creation of Sustainable Mobility for All (SuM4All), a partnership between a wide range of global actors determined to speak with one voice and steer mobility in the right direction.
SuM4All partners include Multilateral Development Banks, United Nations Agencies, bilateral organizations, non-governmental organizations, civil society organizations, and is open to other important entities such as national governments and private companies. Together, these organizations can pool their capacity and experience to orient policymaking, turn ideas into action, and mobilize financing.
In Indonesia, chronic malnutrition is widespread with more than one-third of young children being stunted. Despite the reduction of the poverty rate from 16.6% to 11.4% from 2007 to 2013, the rate of stunting amongst children under the age of five has remained alarmingly high, exceeding 37% in 2013, although that figure has declined in the last two years. Stunting has important lifelong consequences for health, as well as for cognitive development, education, human capital accumulation, and ultimately for economic productivity.
However, to reduce stunting it’s not only important to focus on the health sector. It also requires improvements in other sectors such as agriculture, education, social protection, and water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH). As originally emphasized by the UNICEF conceptual framework, to ensure that a child receives adequate nutrition depends on four critical factors: care, health, environment, and food security, areas that straddle multiple sectors.
The World Bank is releasing its flagship report highlighting the state of the Indian economy, its future growth prospects, the impact of the recent currency exchange on the economy, and the benefits that the progress on the Goods and Services Tax (GST) will have moving forward.
the Atlantic on how female mentors help female engineering students based on a paper forthcoming in PNAS – study only has n=150 at one college, assigned to male mentors, female mentors, or no mentors: 100% of women with female mentors remained in engineering majors at the end of year 1 compared with 82% with male mentors, and 89% without mentors
Mobile payments herald financial opportunity in Somalia. But for whom? And for how long? If Somalia’s telecommunications sector is the locomotive driving the economy, mobile money is the highway, transferring value and extending access to the economic playing field, nowadays at a rapid pace.
The markets for rural energy access and internet connectivity are ripe for disruption – and increasingly, we’re seeing benefit from combining the offerings.
Traditionally, power and broadband industries have been dominated by large incumbent operators, often involving a state-owned enterprise. Today, new business models are emerging, breaking market barriers to jointly provide energy access and broadband connectivity to consumers.
As highlighted in the World Development Report 2016, access to internet has the potential to boost growth, expand economic opportunities, and improve service delivery. The digital economy is growing at 10% a year—significantly faster than the global economy as a whole. Growth in the digital economy is even higher in developing markets: 15 to 25% per year (Boston Consulting Group).
But as cool as they might sound, these innovations do nothing for the one billion people who still live off the grid… and don’t have access to the electricity you need to use the internet in the first place! The findings of the Internet Inclusion Summit panel which the World Bank joined recently put this nicely: “without electricity, internet is only a black hole”.
That’s why efforts to expand electricity and broadband access should go hand in hand: close coordination between the energy and ICT sectors is probably one of the most efficient and sensible ways of making sure rural populations in low-income countries can reap the benefits of digital development. This thinking is also reflected in a new generation of disruptive telecom infrastructure projects.
In the untroubled, quotidian quietude of a cloudy morning in Washington DC on Tuesday this week, I walked from World Bank HQ on Pennsylvania Avenue to the offices of the Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) on F Street, hoping that the skies above would not open up uproariously and ruin the walk. Happily, they did not, and I made it to the plush offices of CIMA, a think tank within the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). I was there to attend a seminar on: Media and Civic Engagement: From Protests to Dialogue. I had been attracted by both the topic and the panelists: Naomi Hossain of the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), Sussex, England, Ivana Bajrovic of NED, Tara Susman-Pena of IREX, a major implementing agency in development, and the World Bank’s own Marco Larizza, one of the authors of the World Development Report 2017 on Governance and Law. The session was ably moderated by Nicholas Benequista of CIMA.
You will notice that I put the word media in quotation marks in the title of the piece. That is because, as often happens in these events, the term at the center of the discussion turned out to be contested. What is media as a subject of intervention and support in international development? It became clear that as the discussion went on that there are those who still think of media in the sense of traditional print and broadcast entities. But there are those --and I am in that group --who think of media in terms of media systems, as in the media ecosystem in a particular country: the totality of the means of communication, how it is structured, owned and governed. There is a normative element here of course; you also want the media system to travel firmly in the direction of pluralism, independence and a capacity to serve as not only an inclusive public forum but as a truculent watchdog. Finally, at the seminar Susman-Pena of IREX was promoting the organization’s intriguing new formulation: Vibrant Information Systems.
These are some of the views and reports relevant to our readers that caught our attention this week.
Fragile States Index 2017 – Annual Report Fund for Peace
The Fragile States Index, produced by The Fund for Peace, is a critical tool in highlighting not only the normal pressures that all states experience, but also in identifying when those pressures are pushing a state towards the brink of failure. By highlighting pertinent issues in weak and failing states, The Fragile States Index—and the social science framework and software application upon which it is built—makes political risk assessment and early warning of conflict accessible to policy-makers and the public at large.
Inclusive Growth Opportunities Index 2017 The Economist Intelligence Unit
Technological advances and globalization have led to major advances for many, but have seen others’ income and well-being stagnate or even decline. These disparities, both real and perceived—and, more broadly, how to make growth inclusive—are some of the greatest challenges facing the world today. Support for inclusive growth—that is, economic growth that is broad-based, sustainable, and provides opportunities for all to participate in its benefits—is gaining momentum. The hoped-for result: dramatic reduction of poverty and inequality. As the world seeks to address these challenges, there is significant potential for private sector actors to pursue unique opportunities that support inclusive growth.
from Apr 17-21. Comment and engage with experts. 
“If everybody’s reading poetry, it’s probably not doing its job. I don’t think it can or ever should be a frontline, popular art form. If it was, I wouldn’t be interested in it. The poetry I will always like sounds like a version of people talking, or singing, or praying. I’ve always thought of it as alternative, not a mainstream activity: a kind of refuge. It’s never been the new rock ‘n’ roll, or the new stand-up comedy or whatever else it’s supposed to have been. It’s still an art form of dissent – to the extent that it even refuses to get to the end of the page. It’s unbiddable!” 
While the case for sustainable mobility is evident, the sector still lacks coherence and clear objectives. There is a way forward, but it requires pro-active cooperation between all stakeholders.
