Malaria is a treatable and preventable disease yet it remains a major challenge to achieving the Millennium Development Goals in Africa. It is not only a serious health problem, but an issue that cripples development. Every year, malaria infects more than 500 million people around the world and...

Sound, deep, and efficient financial sectors are vital for high sustained, private sector-led growth. But financial sectors in their current form pose major problems for the economies of sub Saharan Africa (SSA). Insufficient access to credit by small and medium- sized enterprises constrains...

A Task Force was set up to recommend changes in the way the Bank affects African capacity, both directly through operations aimed at capacity development, and indirectly through the way it conducts its overall business of development lending and cooperation in Africa. Key messages are emerging,...

Migrants have received heightened international recognition from the development community in recent times. New World Bank estimates on the volume of remittances show that documented remittance flows continue to increase at a rapid rate, putting global annual flows at US$88 billion for 2002...

The objectives of the project ($9.37 million, 1996-2001) were to (a) enhance the capacity of the mining sector institutions to carry out their functions of encouraging and regulating investments in the mining sector in an environmentally sound manner and (b) support the use of techniques and...

This project, with a total cost of US$ 92.74 million (IDA, the government of Sierra Leone and five other donors) was declared effective in 1993 and closed in 2001, with country operations being suspended in 1998 and 1999 due to the security situation. The main objectives were: (i) to remove...

The World Bank-assisted Borgou regional pilot rural support project was designed as part of the participatory management approach. It originally involved 250 villages of Benin's Borgou region participating to the Village Level Participatory Approach (VLPA) with the objective of bringing to the...

During the 1998 Second Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD II), a set of ambitious poverty reduction and human development goals were established for the Africa region, drawing on and reaffirming commitments made three years earlier at the First TICAD conference and at...

The objective of the Financial/Private Sector Capacity Building project (1995-2000) was to assist the Government of Mauritania in implementing a program of private sector promotion through strengthening the legal and regulatory framework and creating an enabling environment for private...

The Indigenous Knowledge for Development Program, started in 1998, was the Bank's response to clients, and civil society who called for a more systematic integration of the indigenous knowledge (IK) in the development process. The program developed partnerships, and collaborative links with...