Related items
Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.
-
Cote d’Ivoire Urbanization ReviewWell-managed urbanization can accelerate Cote d’Ivoire’s ascendance to middle incomes. Such a large gap in gross national income (GNI) per capita means that the underlining economic drivers of urbanization are not being fully harnessed in Cote d’Ivoire. Small cities at low urbanization level facilitate internal scale economies, such as hosting a large firm transforming local agricultural products. Secondary cities at intermediate urbanization level facilitate localization economies by enabling linkages between firms operating in the same sector. Large cities at advanced urbanization level facilitate urbanization economies through a diverse economic base nurturing innovation. Drawing on the findings of the World Development Report 2009 applied to the Ivorian context, the authors identify three types of cities in the country: global connector cities generating urbanization economies needed for innovation, increasing return to scale activities, and global competitiveness; regional connector cities generating localization economies needed for efficient regional trade and transport; and domestic connector cities generating internal scale economies needed to unleash the agricultural potential of regions. Cote d’Ivoire’s small cities and market towns can be anchors generating scale economies for agribusiness. While southwest regions strongly contribute to the production and export of cash crops, savanna areas can help scale up food and cereal production to supply urban centers domestically and regionally.
-
Making Transport Work for Women and Men : Tools for Task TeamsThe primary objective of this report is
 to provide brief, relevant, and practical tools for World
 Bank task teams and their country counterparts to facilitate
 their work in addressing gender issues in transport policies
 and projects. This responds to the need, expressed by task
 teams, to repackage and condense existing gender and
 transport tools in formats more relevant to transport
 operations. These tools can also be used for training on
 gender and transport. The term tool was selected to convey
 the notion that these materials are nuts and bolts resources
 to be used when needed, and to emphasize that they are not
 requirements or directives.
-
Rural Transport : Improving its Contribution to Growth and Poverty Reduction in Sub-Saharan AfricaPoverty reduction is a long-standing development objective of many developing countries and their aid donors, including the World Bank. To achieve this goal, these countries and organizations have sought to improve smallholder agricultural productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) as part of a broader rural development agenda aimed at providing a minimal basket of goods and services in rural areas to satisfy basic human needs. These goods and services include not only food, health care, and education, but also infrastructure. As a result, rural transport remains a constraint to increasing agricultural productivity, achieving rural growth, and thus alleviating rural poverty. The first major finding of the review of rural transport theory and practice is that many of the approaches needed to improve the impact of rural transport interventions on poverty reduction are known, particularly from the work of the Rural Travel and Transport Program (RTTP) of Sub-Saharan Africa Transport Policy Program (SSATP). Unfortunately, many of the recommended approaches remain untested within Sub-Saharan Africa beyond the pilot scale, notwithstanding their influence on rural transport policy and project design in other operational regions of the Bank. For SSA, these are missed opportunities. Even where SSA countries have applied these approaches, institutional and financial sustainability and scaling up local successes remain significant challenges for both their agriculture and transport sectors. The second key finding is that rural households are rarely the point of focus in the design of rural transport interventions in SSA, even though a methodology to allow this focus has been developed and successfully tested in several pilot projects since the 1980s, the result is that the transport needs of rural households continue to be analyzed and understood by means of an indirect assessment of those needs, which means that most projects have a less than desirable impact on improving the rural access and mobility situation of such households.