Building on a World Bank regional study in Africa aiming at measuring social contracts concepts and within the framework of reflecting on future donor interventions, this paper applies social contracts measurement and complements with qualitative assessments in Somalia. This paper uses the...

Sub-Saharan Africa has achieved significant gains in reducing the levels of extreme poverty in recent decades, yet the region continues to experience challenges across the development indicators, including energy access, literacy, delivery of services and goods, and jobs skills, as well as low...

What can be learned from the governance trajectory of African countries since the beginning of the 21st century What is the quality of governance on the African continent and how does it shape development The first decade of the millennium saw promising growth and poverty reduction in much of...

In 2019, an Independent Evaluation Group review on the growing use of social contracts terminology by the World Bank concluded that social contract diagnostics are useful analytical innovations with relevant operational implications, particularly in situations of transition and social unrest....

This paper draws lessons from an original randomized experiment in Malawi. In order to understand why roads in relatively good condition in rural areas may not be used by buses, a minibus service was subsidized over a six-month period over a distance of 20 kilometers to serve five villages....

Starting with the hypothesis that behaviors are the critical (and often overlooked) factor in public sector performance, this paper explores the notion of how behavioral change (and thus institutional change) might be better motivated in the public sector. The basis for this study is "an...

This paper uses Zambia as a case study to assess empirically whether political interference in a low-governance environment has diminished in the past years as expected after a semi-autonomous agency model was set up ten years ago. The road sector in Zambia has experienced some significant...

In 2019, an Independent Evaluation Group review on the growing use of social contracts terminology by the World Bank concluded that social contract diagnostics are useful analytical innovations with relevant operational implications, particularly in situations of transition and social unrest....

What drives citizen's trust in state institutions There are longstanding debates on the pathways towards institutional trust: is trust driven by citizen's perceptions of policy outcomes or by their perceptions of the integrity and credibility of policy processes This paper investigates this...