Page 23 - World Development Report News Today

Improving data infrastructure helps ensure equitable access for poor people in poor countries 2021 World Development Report: Data for Better Lives An explosion of data Global data traffic has increased one thousand times over the last 20 years. Data travel thousands of kilometers along this seamless global data infrastructure supply chain at breathtaking speeds of 200,000 kilometers per second—meaning that digital data can, in principle, circle the globe five times within a second. This explo...

Building gender aware data systems is critical to create a level playing field for women and girls Photo: © Stephan Gladieu / World Bank To advance an affirmative answer to this question, the World Development Report (WDR) 2021: Data for Better Lives calls for a new social contract for data that ensures better representation for marginalized people. This means that data captured and analyzed in data systems reflect the needs of ALL people. While data are generally undersupplied and underused...

Building gender aware data systems are critical to create a level playing field for women and girls Photo: © Stephan Gladieu / World Bank To advance an affirmative answer to this question, the World Development Report (WDR) 2021: Data for Better Lives calls for a new social contract for data that ensures better representation for marginalized people. This means that data captured and analyzed in data systems reflect the needs of ALL people. While data are generally undersupplied and underuse...

Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) suffered more health and economic damage from the COVID 19 pandemic than any other region, although there is potential for significant transformation in key sectors as the region begins to rebound, according to a new World Bank Report. Because of the pandemic, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the Latin America and Caribbean region (excluding Venezuela) fell 6.7% in 2020. A return to growth of 4.4% is expected in 2021. That compares to the Banks late 2020 for...

North Africa hit by brain drain of ICT graduates According to a the World Bank’s World Development Report 2021: Data for better lives, the main cause of migration of ICT professionals from North African countries such as Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia, is economic, since the loss of talent is being linked to the huge wage gaps that exist between high- and low-income countries. “Given salary differentials of five to 10 times between data scientists in low- and high-income countr...

1Department of Global Health and Development, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, London, UK; 2Bukavu Medical University College/Institut Supérieur des Techniques Médicales de Bukavu (ISTM-Bukavu), Bukavu, Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo; 3Centre de Recherche sur la Démocratie et le Développement en Afrique (CREDDA), Université Libre des Pays des Grands Lacs, Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo; 4School of Environmental Sciences, Njala University, Freetown, Sierra Leone; ...

How much should governments spend on data? Image from Chapter 2 of the 2021 World Development Report: Data for Better Lives Some years ago, researchers documented that marathon finishing times follow a special pattern. Many runners finish just ahead of 3:30 hours, 4:00 hours, and other 30-minute thresholds while few people finish just after those thresholds. There is no physiological reason to believe that runners are much more capable of finishing 42.2 kilometers in three hours and fifty-nine ...

The Challenges and Opportunities of Urbanization By Laila Waqar Towns and cities have become the preferred locations for living. At the start of the 1800s, only 2% of the world’s population lived in the cities. Today, around 54% of the population lives in urban areas according to the statistics provided by the World Bank. This signals exponential growth in urbanization mainly owing to the industrial revolution that encouraged people to migrate to the cities in search of employment. Graana.com...

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of digital technologies in African countries, and the latest Africa’s Pulse provides new evidence on how digital is enhancing the productivity of existing jobs and creating new jobs, for people of all skill levels and backgrounds. This is particularly important as the region looks toward economic recovery post-pandemic, and

Deepak Mishra, Practice Manager in the World Bank’s Macroeconomics, Trade, and Investment Global Practice, has been appointed as the next director and chief executive of the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER). He will take the charge from Rajat Kathuria who has been the director and chief executive of ICRIER since 1st September 2012. Mishra has held various positions at the World Bank, including co-director of the World Development Report 2016 (Digital...