Kuraisa lives in the Majhaulia village in Muzaffarpur district of Bihar, India. As an artisan, she and her family create traditional lac bangles – colorful bracelets made of resinous materials and usually molded in hot kilns – in their small home production unit.
In early 2016, Kuraisa joined a self-help group made up of other lac bangle producers and supported through the World Bank’s Bihar Rural Livelihoods Project (BRLP), also known locally as JEEViKA.
The self-help group taught Kuraisa new design techniques and loaned her $2,300 to start her own business. One year later , Kuraisa has added two more production units to her home, which provide full time jobs to her relatives and to as many as 6 additional workers during peak season.
Kuraisa’s annual business income has now tripled to $10,000. The self-help group has expanded and nearly 50 artisan families in the village have joined, giving rise to a village enterprise cluster with an annual revenue of $450,000.
But I have never found more compelling numbers than those related to food. In a world where 842 million people go to bed hungry every night, we actually produce sufficient food to provide, on average, 2,700 kilocalories every day, for everyone. In this same world:
Between one-fourth and one-third of the nearly 4 billion metric tons of food produced annually for human consumption is lost or wasted.
Asia and Africa account for about 67% of all food lost and wasted, globally.
North America and Oceania lose and waste almost half of what they produce: 42%! More than half of food loss and waste in developed countries happens during consumption — usually as a result of a deliberate decision to throw food away.
- Developing countries lose an average of 120 to 220 kg of food per person per year, which means that even regions ridden by undernutrition, such as South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, lose as many as 400 to 500 kilocalories per person, every day.
Food Lost and Wasted by Region, 2009
The recent massive streets protests against the brutal and deadly assault on a young woman in a private bus in India capital, New Delhi, have been likened to the Arab Spring of India, a definitive turning point in the country’s political evolution. Clearly, in both its composition and content, the protests resonate with, not only the revolutionary street demonstrations in early 2011 in many countries in the Middle East, but also with a number of other movements that have burgeoned in countries across the world over the last couple of years. In the wake of the Arab Spring, and supposedly drawing inspiration from it, demonstrators occupied the financial centers of the US and Europe, conjuring up images of the 1960s. Unrest over austerity measures in European capitals hit by the global financial crisis continued. In the UK and Chile, students took to the streets protesting against high university fees. And in India itself, the anti-rape protests came on the heels of an anticorruption movement, unparalleled in its mass participation, media attention, and longevity.
Auteurs: Richard Akresh, Damien de Walque et Harounan Kazianga
Dans une récente étude, nous présentons les impacts sur l’éducation d’un projet-pilote de transferts monétaires au Burkina Faso1, dans la Province du Nahouri. Ce projet-pilote est accompagné d’une évaluation d’impact expérimentale randomisée pour mesurer et comparer, dans le même contexte en zone rurale au Burkina Faso, l’efficacité de transferts monétaires conditionnels et non-conditionnels qui ciblent les ménages pauvres. Les programmes de transferts monétaires conditionnels (TMC), comme les transferts monétaires non-conditionnels (TMNC), transfèrent des ressources monétaires aux ménages pauvres à intervalles réguliers. Mais la différence principale c’est que les TMC imposent des conditions aux ménages, telles que l’inscription et la fréquentation scolaire pour les enfants d’âge scolaire.
Avec les TMC, si les conditions ne sont pas respectées pour une période donnée, les transferts ne sont pas payés pour cette période. Au contraire, avec les TMNC, il n’y pas de conditions à respecter.
The World Bank and the Catholic Church are the two most influential anti-poverty institutions in the world. One works primarily with governments and the international community; the other through a global network encompassing more than a billion adherents.
Bishkek, Kyrgyz Republic – Laura Tuck, the vice president for the World Bank’s Europe and Central Asia unit, talks about her trip to Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan and important issues related to the economic growth of the region that she discussed in these Central Asian countries.
I am still shaken and saddened by the many lives lost to the attacks in Kabul two weeks ago and since then there has been more violence. As we grieve these tragedies, now is the time to stand strong with the people of Afghanistan and renew our commitment to build a peaceful and prosperous country.
To that end, we announced this week a new financing package of more than half-a-billion dollars to help Afghanistan through its struggle to end poverty, increase opportunity to help stabilize the country, and ensure all its citizens can access basic services during a time of economic uncertainty.
Afghanistan has come a long way since 2001 and achieved much progress under extremely challenging circumstances. Life expectancy has increased from 44 to 60 years, maternal mortality has decreased by more than three quarters and the country now boasts 18 million mobile phone subscribers, up from almost none in 2001.
Yet, the development needs in Afghanistan remain massive. Nearly 40 percent of Afghans live in poverty and almost 70 percent of the population are illiterate. The country needs to create new jobs for about 400,000 people entering the labor market each year. The situation is made more challenging by the return of around 5.8 million refugees and 1.2 million internally displaced people.
Our new support is in line with our belief that Afghanistan’s economic and social progress can also help it address security challenges. Our financing package meets the pressing needs of returning refugees, expands private-sector opportunities for the poor, boosts the development of five cities, expands electrification, improves food security, and builds rural roads.
Cards on the table, confronted with a closely argued 11 page exec sum, I am unlikely to then read the full report. But the short version of Meeting the Challenges of Crisis States, by James Putzel (LSE) and Jonathan Di John (SOAS), is a meal in itself. It summarizes 5 years of DFID-funded research by the Crisis States Research Centre, led by the London School of Economics, and is a great way to take the temperature of academic thinking on ‘states with adjectives’ – fragile, failing, crisis etc etc.
The key question it seeks to answer is why the daily and inevitable tensions of politics and ‘conflict as usual’, which exist in any society, tip some states over into a downward spiral of distintegration, grand theft and violence, while others, even poor ones, prove resilient. Key Findings?
Like most political scientists, Putzel and Di John believe that if you want to understand politics, you have to understand elites. And that means jettisoning preconceptions of ‘good governance’ (aka how much do the institutions resemble an idealized notion of American/European democracy) and thinking instead about the underlying political settlement. How do individuals and groups with different slices of power protect and negotiate over their pieces of the pie?
What leads to fragility? In the rather disturbing language of the report:
Cũng có ở Tiếng Việt
A version of this blog was published on Thanh Nien Newspaper on February 1, 2013
Here are some fact and figures:
The business case for using social media in communications is clear: Social media is faster, often cheaper and, for the most part, offers a better way to connect. For communicators, social media is (or should be) an intrinsic part of every campaign or project.