This podcast explores the concepts and realities surrounding resilient housing. Through interviews, sound bites, and trips to countries where resilient housing is underway, we will share with you the World Bank’s new effort to support building homes better before a disaster strikes. From structural engineers to government officials, you will hear from a wide variety of professionals working to strengthen the homes we live in. Leveraging technologies, such as drones, street cameras, and machine learning, and pairing them with low cost, life-saving construction methods, the Global Program for Re ..read more

Despite the incredible progress that so many African countries have made, poverty remains a defining part of the narrative around Africa. While the share of people living in extreme poverty has come down in the last decades, the number of people has gone up, due to rapid population growth during the same period, to reach nearly 416 million people. If left unchecked, extreme poverty in the world will become almost exclusively an African issue by 2030, in just ten years. In this episode of Afronomics, Albert Zeufack welcomes Kathleen Beegle and Luc Christiaensen, the main authors of a new World ..read more

The 2019 World Development Report focused on the Future of Work on a global scale, highlighting the real tension between job losses in “old” manufacturing sectors that are susceptible to automation, and potential job gains driven by innovation in “new” sectors. Our Africa-focused companion report, released in July 2019, finds that Africa has a chance to take a different path – if governments and businesses can take advantage of digital technologies, and if the right policies and investments are in place.   Part two of this two-part podcast examines the role of social protection in helping ..read more

The 2019 World Development Report focused on the Future of Work on a global scale, highlighting the real tension between job losses in “old” manufacturing sectors that are susceptible to automation, and potential job gains driven by innovation in “new” sectors. Our Africa-focused companion report, released in July 2019, finds that Africa has a chance to take a different path – if governments and businesses can take advantage of digital technologies, and if the right policies and investments are in place.   Part one of this two-part podcast looks at what’s different about the future of wor ..read more

Doing More With Less – Smarter Subsidies for Water Supply and Sanitation shows that most existing water supply and sanitation subsidies are pervasive, expensive, poorly-targeted, non-transparent and distortionary. Yet if designed in smart and targeted ways and implemented effectively, subsidies can be powerful and progressive tools that help ensure all people benefit from water supply and sanitation services ..read more

Quality: Unknown — The Invisible Water Crisis presents new evidence and data that call urgent attention to the hidden dangers lying beneath the water’s surface. This podcast explains how poor water quality stalls economic progress, stymies human potential, and reduces food production ..read more

Discussions on Sub-Saharan Africa often center on extreme poverty: the subcontinent is home to half of the world’s extreme poor, and the number of people living in extreme poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa keeps going up even though the rates of extreme poverty have declined. At the same time, on a continent as economically diverse as Sub-Saharan Africa, the issue of inequality cannot be ignored. Eight of the ten most unequal countries in the world, when looking at the Gini coefficient, are in Sub-Saharan Africa, and gaps persist when digging deeper into wage inequality, inequality of opportunity ..read more

This podcast explores the concepts and realities surrounding resilient housing. Through interviews, sound bites, and trips to countries where resilient housing is underway, our host, David Cavell, will teach you about the World Bank’s new effort to support building homes better before a disaster strikes. From structural engineers to government officials, you will hear from a wide variety of professionals working to strengthen the homes we live in. Leveraging technologies, such as drones, street cameras, and machine learning, and pairing them with low cost, life-saving construction methods, the ..read more

Sub-Saharan Africa is the only region where the share of adults with a mobile money account now exceeds 10 percent. That mobile revolution began in Kenya. In this episode of Afronomics, World Bank Chief Economist for Africa, Albert Zeufack, speaks with Professor Njuguna Ndung’u who is currently the Executive Director of the African Economic Research Consortium and was the Governor of the Central Bank of Kenya from 2007 to 2015. During Prof. Ndung’u’s tenure as Central Bank governor, Kenya stepped up as a global leader in financial inclusion. This was driven by the path-breaking M-Pesa program ..read more

This podcast explains how a new generation of infrastructure projects that harness the power of nature can help achieve development goals, including water security and climate resilience. In a new report from the World Bank and World Resources Institute, both organizations are calling for green infrastructure, such as mangroves and wetlands, to play a bigger role in traditional infrastructure planning ..read more