The World Bank is committed to providing opportunities for healthy child development, and ensuring safe sanitation and good hygiene is critical to achieving that. In Tanzania, the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Partnership worked with the government to create and implement campaigns to...

The World Bank is committed to ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity. Providing clean, safe water to people wherever they live is critical to achieving these goals. A World Bank research team analyzed more than 130 water, sanitation and hygiene evaluations to understand what...

Conditional cash transfer programs are often used to encourage poor families to take young children for regular health check-ups and enroll them in school decision making. Can cash transfers successfully cut transmission of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and acquired immunodeficiency...

Access to proper sanitation helps keep children healthy, but millions of people in the developing world still practice open defecation, putting children at risk. Diarrhea, which can result from the spread of fecal material into food or mouths, kills around 800,000 children under the age of five...

Worldwide, some 57 million primary school age children don't have the chance to go to school. Many factors hold these children back: poverty, poor health and overcrowded or faraway facilities. The problem is most acute in Sub-Saharan Africa, where some 30 million primary school age children...

More people around the world are dying from noncommunicable diseases than ever before. These diseases, which include cancer, chronic respiratory diseases, diabetes, and heart disease, prematurely kill more than 15 million people between ages 30 and 69 each year. Many of these health conditions...

Performance pay for teachers generates debate. Proponents argue that many school systems have low levels of accountability and advocate incentivizing teachers by linking their pay to either their own efforts or their students’ learning. Critics, however, raise concerns that performance pay...

The World Bank’s Strategic Impact Evaluation Fund supported a randomized controlled trial from 2015-2018 to assess the extent to which subsidized microloans can enable households to build and use improved toilets. The loans, which carried zero interest, included toilet installation and were...

Safe drinking water is essential for healthy human development and survival, but millions of poor people in low-income countries only have access to contaminated drinking water. For children, the problem is particularly dangerous and deadly, with diarrheal diseases like typhoid and cholera...

Training vouchers and microfinance tools are often used by multilateral organizations, non-governmental organizations, and governments to increase employment and business oppor¬tunities in low- and middle-income countries. An alternative is putting cash directly in the hands of the poor...