The international community is currently planning for a potential political settlement in Afghanistan. Negotiations may bring opportunities for significant reductions in violence. Government and development partners are considering how to support, consolidate, and sustain any reduction in...

Section one of the paper provides a broad overview of the nature and objectives of the projects. Section two contains an objective view of the impact of FIRST funded projects on the growth in insurance markets as measured by insurance market penetration. Rigorous data analysis was used to...

Ratings for the Early Childhood Development Project are as follows: Outcome was moderately unsatisfactory, Bank performance was moderately unsatisfactory, and Quality of monitoring and evaluation was modest. This assessment offers the following lessons: (1) Collaboration, strong national...

Gender equality has long been central to the World Bank's twin goals of ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity in a sustainable manner. More recently, women's and girls' empowerment (WGE) has become a priority in the Africa region in the context of the region's demographic...

Adolescent girls are viewed as a key demographic group to target for successfully breaking the intergenerational transmission of poverty in developing countries. Unfortunately, for many teenage girls in developing countries, adolescence entails a fleeting transition from childhood to adulthood,...

Over the past several decades, robust economic growth and sustained poverty reduction have made the Dominican Republic (DR) a regional success story, yet the country's adolescent pregnancy rate remains far above the average for Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) and is closer to the levels...