Converging technologies promise a new era of delivering education, health, and social services to millions of digitally excluded. Hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic and beset with low human development outcomes, how can South Asia bring these benefits to vulnerable groups, adapt technologies, and build trust and protection against risks?

Facing Forward lays out a range of policy and implementation actions that are needed for countries in Sub-Saharan Africa to meet the challenge of improving learning while expanding access and completion of basic education for all. The book underscores the importance of aligning the education system to be relentlessly focused on learning outcomes and to ensuring that all children have access to good schools, good learning materials, and good teachers. It is unique in characterizing countrie...

With challenges similar to those faced by a number of low income countries, Madagascar faces critical policy choices with respect to post-basic education. Enrolment ratios in senior secondary education and tertiary education are 10 percent and 3 percent, respectively, among the lowest in the world. Critical skill shortages and pervasive inequities in access necessitate changes in the quantity and quality of education and skills. The increasing number of basic education completers and demog...

The Democratic Republic of Congo faces the challenge of providing universal primary education and expanding opportunities for post-secondary education and training for its youth, ages 12 to 24. This study analyzes the current educational attainment and school enrollment status of youth, as well as the formal and informal post-secondary educational and training opportunities available to them. The study uses the results of a simulation model that incorporates enrollment in alternative educa...

South Asia is heavily impacted by the devastating loss of lives and human capital from the COVID-19 pandemic and the converging technology revolution sweeping the globe. The Converging Technology Revolution and Human Capital: Potential and Implications for South Asia looks at how the region could capitalize on these technologies to accelerate its development of human capital and promote adaptability and resilience to future shocks. The convergence of technological breakthroughs spanning bi...

This study analyzes the current educational attainment and school enrollment status of youth, as well as the formal and informal post-secondary educational and training opportunities available to them. The study uses the results of a simulation model that incorporates enrollment in alternative education programs and considers alternative scenarios for developing the post-primary sector. Each scenario is evaluated for the impact on the human capital accumulation of young people and the sustain...

With challenges similar to those faced by a number of low income countries, Madagascar faces critical policy choices with respect to post-basic education. Enrolment ratios in senior secondary education and tertiary education are 10 percent and 3 percent, respectively, among the lowest in the world. Critical skill shortages and pervasive inequities in access necessitate changes in the quantity and quality of education and skills. The increasing number of basic education completers and demograp...

While everybody recognizes the development challenges facing Sub-Saharan Africa, few have put together coherent plans that offer real hope for any feasible and general improvement. Facing Forward combines an evidence-based plan that not only recognizes the deep problems but provides specific prescriptions for dealing with the problems. In the simplest version, focus on the skills of the people and do it in a rational and achievable manner. †“ Eric Hanushek, Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fello...

This evaluation examines the relevance and effectiveness of Poverty Reduction Support Credits (PRSCs), introduced by the Bank in early 2001 to support comprehensive growth, improve social conditions, and reduce poverty in IDA countries. PRSCs were intended to allow greater country-ownership, provide more predictable annual support, exhibit more flexible conditionality, and strengthen budget processes in a results-based framework. By September 2009, the Bank had approved 99 PRSCs totaling some...

In the struggle against unemployment and marginalization, employability has become the one major tool to counteract this phenomenon. Those who have no chances to develop or enhance their employability will fail in the competitive labor market of the new economic order. While the notion of employability is not exactly new, the weight now being placed upon it is new: to equip job seekers for the far-reaching changes currently taking place in the economy and the world of work. What is at stak...

Comparative Corporate Governance considers the impact of globalization on corporate governance issues and highlights how, despite the effect it has clearly had, predictions of legal convergence have not come true. By adopting a comparative legal approach, this book explores the tensions that exist between convergence attempts and the persistence of local models of governance in the US, Europe and Asia.Veronique Magnier assesses institutional, cultural and sociological fact...

This evaluation assesses the Bank Group's support for environmental sustainability in both the public and private sectors over the past 15 years. It identifies several crucial constraints that need to be addressed, perhaps most importantly insufficient government commitment to environmental goals and weak institutional capacity to deal with them. But constraints within the Bank Group, including insufficient attention to longer-term sustainable development, must be reduced as well. The Ba...