Annual Reports and Recent Publications

Today, governments and international organizations are scaling up programs for the reduction of poverty, but they have difficulties in reaching the poorest. The extreme poor suffer from many handicaps (lack of financial resources, education, employment, housing, health care, empowerment),which have a mutually reinforcing impact, and often lead to social exclusion. Together, the isolation and the state of deprivation in which the very poor live imply that traditional development programs and policies which may be effective in helping the poor may not always work for the poorest.

Reaching the poorest in society remains a challenge for NGOs, governments and aid agencies that design and implement poverty reduction programs. To understand why as well as identify practical ways of moving forward, a seminar on extreme poverty was organized at the World Bank in October 2005. The case studies compiled in this book emerged from that seminar and they show how helping the very poor to emerge from poverty requires not only extra public resources, effort, and time, but also a broader approach to development policy. In particular it is important to learn from the poor themselves as to how they cope with multiple deprivations and what is needed from their point of view to attack extreme poverty.

Subsidies for utility services are widespread in the water supply, sanitation, and electricity sectors. One motivation is to improve social welfare of the poor by facilitating their access to and use of such services, as well as by redistributing resources to augment their purchasing power. At the same time, such subsidies have often been seen as engendering resource use inefficiencies and financially weak utilities, which hobble efforts to expand and improve service. Those adverse consequences have often been used to argue against charging consumers less than the cost of service.

This book makes a substantive contribution to our thinking on a key facet of the debate: the distributional impact of consumer subsidies for urban water supply and electricity services. Drawing together empirical research across a wide range of countries, it documents the prevalence and variants of consumer subsidies found in the developing world and presents a number of indicators that are useful in assessing the degree to which such subsidies benefit the poor. The findings are placed in a broader social protection framework where comparisons are drawn with poverty focused programs in other sectors using a common metric.

Gender, Time Use and Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa (pdf)
Edited by C. Mark Blackden and Quentin Wodon

This volume aims to shed light on the question of “time poverty” in Sub-Saharan Africa and its relationship with consumption-based measures of poverty, as well as other development outcomes. Time poverty, especially as seen in the “double workday” of women, has long been a staple of discussion of women’s situation in Africa. Yet it is not always clear what is meant by time poverty, how time poverty is measured, or what actions are required to tackle time poverty once identified. The papers presented in this volume seek to address these questions by reviewing the existing literature and analyzing new data available in time use modules of household income and consumption surveys in several African countries. The objective is to provide guidance and examples of how to define and measure time poverty, and also to address ways through which a better understanding of time poverty can inform poverty diagnostics, national poverty reduction strategies, and the design and implementation of development interventions.