March 17, 2021 marks one year since the first cases of COVID-19 were registered in the Kyrgyz Republic. The pandemic has hit the country hard and exposed challenges in several areas - from public health and education to migration policy. For a small, land-locked economy that is reliant on services, remittances, and natural resources, the pandemic has had a highly negative effect that could reverse much of the development progress achieved in recent years. Preliminary analysis shows that the scale of the crisis might be comparable to the social and economic cataclysm that occurred after the collapse of the Soviet economic system 30 years ago.

Loss of nature and biodiversity worldwide has become a crisis. The World Bank Group’s approach paper on biodiversity and ecosystem services, Unlocking Nature-Smart Development, argues that the global nature crisis is both a systemic risk for development and a development opportunity. The report proposes six global response areas to guide governments and inform broader discussions on how to integrate nature into development planning.

For those living in rural Zambia, poverty rates were stubbornly high, impacting as much as 78 percent of the population and disproportionately?affecting adolescent girls and women. Although the country had achieved close to universal access to primary education, secondary school coverage was falling and included only about 40 percent of school aged children.  

National data confirmed that investments in human capital development—health, education, and social protection for the poorest and most vulnerable households—were critical to national economic growth. According to national household data and World Bank analyses, when girls went to secondary school, they earned almost 100 percent more than their peers who did not. And when women worked outside of agriculture, their earnings increased by roughly 35 percent.  

Based on this knowledge, Zambia made it a priority to help more girls and women reach their potential. With support from IDA,...

 

Today, the world is at a moment of inflection where questions of building back societies that are more inclusive and sustainable are highly prevalent. Beyond the pandemic, Indigenous and other vulnerable groups are facing devastating impacts from climate change. To understand what has driven resilience for Indigenous Peoples during the pandemic and recent extreme climate events, the World Bank has leveraged its ongoing dialogue with Indigenous leaders and recently carried out a pilot study in Central America where 15 Indigenous communities were surveyed in six countries. The findings of the survey will be published in the next few months. Three critical factors emerged: natural capital, cultural capital, and social capital.

Liberia's Minister of Mines and Energy, Hon. Gesler Murray reflects on the current state of the power sector in the country and the government's ambition to connect more citizens to the grid and provide them with more affordable and reliable energy.

COVID-19 hit Nepal hard—and at a particularly inopportune time. Nepal’s public debt increased by 35.5 percent in FY2019/20 amid mounting expenditures to mitigate COVID-19 and falling tax revenues due to slowdown in economic activities. The government had established the national Public Debt Management Office (PDMO) in 2018. Its new staff, re-assigned to PDMO from other government departments, needed training on essential debt management functions. Moreover, the information needed for sound debt-management practices was scattered among different public institutions.

Nepal-DMF Partnership pays off

Nepal adapted swiftly—with support from the Debt Management Facility (DMF).  The DMF is a multi-donor trust fund jointly implemented by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. It offers advisory services, training, and peer-to-peer learning to more than 80 developing countries around the world to strengthen their debt management capacity, processes,...

The International Monetary Fund, World Bank Group, World Health Organization and World Trade Organization have joined forces to accelerate access to COVID-19 vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics by leveraging multilateral finance and trade solutions, particularly in low- and middle-income countries.

The aim is to vaccinate at least 40 percent of people in every country by the end of 2021, and at least 60 percent by mid-2022.  The effort will track, coordinate, and advance delivery of COVID-19 vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics, working with governments and partners at the global and local levels to address finance and trade barriers to ensure that vulnerable populations have access to these life-saving tools. It supports the goals of the ACT-Accelerator and complementary initiatives.

The Multilateral Leaders Task Force members are mobilizing critical financing, with a focus on grants and concessional lending; helping to...

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because a large part of the world remains unvaccinated and this is a danger for all of us," so warns Mamta Murthi, the World Bank's Vice President for Human Development.

  And what's being done to help?  In the latest edition of The Development Podcast, we're examining these questions and more.  

From Addis Ababa, Dr. Ahmed Ogwell, Deputy Director of the Africa Centers for Disease Control, details how the COVID-19 pandemic has unfolded across the African continent, and the steps being taken to increase vaccination rates.

Back in Washington, Murthi joins Raka Banerjee and Paul Blake to talk about global trends and the support that the World Bank Group is giving to countries and partners in the race to vaccinate the world...

Ten years ago, the first Syrian refugees fleeing conflict and violence in their home country began arriving in Turkey. What began as a trickle soon became an influx. Today, Turkey is home to more than 3.6 million Syrian refugees, who constitute the vast majority of over 4 million refugees and asylum seekers currently living in country, making Turkey the world’s largest host of refugees.

The magnitude of the refugee influx is nothing that Turkey could have prepared for. With as many as 98.5% of Syrians under temporary protection (SuTPs) now living out of camps in many cities and towns that were already facing significant development obstacles, providing adequate services and support - such as infrastructure, education, housing, and employment - for millions of additional people has been a monumental challenge.

With the help of the World Bank and the European Union, the Government of Turkey unleashed a wide-ranging response to cope with the refugee crisis....

As of July 29, 2021, the World Bank approved operations to support vaccine rollout in 54 countries amounting to $4.6 billion. See the latest project financing, project documents and procurement information in the list below. More information will be shared here as it becomes available. 

Through this, the World Bank Group is working with partners on the largest vaccination effort in history to stop the COVID-19 pandemic. On April 2, 2020, at the initial COVID-19 response phase, the World Bank’s Board of Executive Directors approved a $6 billion Global COVID-19 Response Program (also called the COVID-19 Strategic Preparedness and Response Program, or SPRP). The program has reached over 100 countries with emergency operations to prevent, detect, and respond to COVID-19 and strengthen systems for public health preparedness. The timing of potential vaccine development was not known when the SPRP was approved, but global vaccine development efforts...