Friday, June 3, 2011

Your Love is your Balance Sheet

The Birth is your Opening Balance
Your Death is our Closing Balance
Your Ideas are your Assets
Your Views are your Liabilities
Your Happiness is your Profits
Your Sorrows are your Losses
Your Soul is your Goodwill
Your Heart is your Fixed Asset
Your Duties are your Outstanding Expenses
Your Friendships your Hidden Adjustment
Your Character is your Capital
Your Knowledge is your Investments
Your Patience is your Interest
Your Mind is your Bank Balance
Your Thinking is your Current Account
Your Behavior is your Journal Entry
Bad Things you should always Depreciate and lastly
Your Love is your Balance Sheet...

Eradicating Guinea Worm: What do our data have to say?

In yesterday's New York Times Nicholas Kristof highlights an area of good news in the developing world: progress on the eradication of Guinea worm. I'll direct you to his article if you want a brief description of this terrible parasite, the effects it has on those who are infected, and how it spreads. It'll make you grateful for clean water, especially if you look at the photos.

And it'll also make you grateful for the hard work of individuals who've been fighting to eradicate the disease because it appears they are meeting with great success. To quote Kristof's article, “For the last 24 years, former President Jimmy Carter has led the global struggle against the disease. When he started, there were 3.5 million cases annually in 20 countries. Last year, there were fewer than 3,200 cases in four countries: Ethiopia, Ghana, Mali, and Sudan.”

Such numbers are truly something to celebrate. And we wouldn't be researchers if such an article didn't also bring a lot of questions to mind:

“Was foreign aid a positive contributor to that outcome or do other variables claim the majority of the credit?”
“Were official donors even contributing to this successful eradication campaign or was it entirely addressed by the private sector?”
“What other parasitic diseases are aid donors currently focusing on?”

Yet, as all good researchers know, the problem is not in finding good questions but in finding good data to help answer those questions. Here at AidData we have been (and continue to be!) hard at work trying to improve data on development finance to help researchers answer questions like these. Using guinea worm as an example here are some points which highlight the strengths of AidData while also focusing on the need for further improved data in certain areas.

Let's say you wanted to ask the question:

“Which donors have made contributions specifically for Guinea Worm?”

Would you be shocked if I told you the answer to this question was that the second biggest contributor was Kuwait? And that the data also reveals that the Carter Foundation received some of their funding from the OPEC Fund for International Development (the third largest donor in this chart)?

Are you suddenly inclined to feel more charitable towards oil exporters because though you curse under your breath as you fill your gas tank each week you can now view them as an organization that is helping to eradicate an awful disease? Or are suddenly skeptical of these numbers because it seems hard to believe that rich developing nations like the US and Japan are giving less than Kuwait and OPEC?

Well lets review how I arrived at these numbers, we're all about transparency here at AidData. If you keyword search the data for the terms "Guinea worm" and "Dracunculosis" you'd find the following breakdown by donor:

[Note: AidData.org is still in beta and we are aware our keyword search function on the website is lacking. We are working on improving it. In the meantime we recommend you perform your keyword searches in an external SQL client. You can download the full dataset to do such keyword searches by using the current research release.]

Do you still find this chart surprising? To be honest, though this certainly highlights some (perhaps many) of the dollars allocated to combat guinea worm, it is certainly not an accurate representation of all financing for the campaign.

This is a great opportunity to highlight several weak points in the data that currently make it difficult to narrow down this type of information accurately.

Reasons why certain flows may not be included here:

Donors have reported limited information. Depending on the donor we may be lacking either breadth of coverage (# of years, types of flows reported) or depth of coverage (# of fields populated, quality of descriptive information). If a donor has given money to help combat guinea worm but the information they report only tells us they gave funding for "infectious disease" we cannot isolate these dollars from other dollars committed to fund infectious disease. The United States may have contributed much more funding to guinea worm eradication than we can isolate here--but we don't KNOW because the descriptive quality of their data does not allow us to isolate these funds.
The source of the financing is a private foundation. Currently AidData does not have information from private foundations public on the website, though we are currently working to obtain some of this data. The data available right now in our database consists of information from official bilateral donors and multilateral organizations--some of them funnel their donations through private foundations like the Carter foundation, this OPEC grant. [Certainly we know we are missing some private foundation financing--you can find, for example, that the Gates Foundation has given 2 grants to the Carter Foundation for this purpose (see them here and here). If we include the Gates dollars they would surpass even the United Kingdom on this graph.]
Language barriers. Some data is not in English making it tricky to isolate information based on key words.

Anyway, what's the bottom line? Well the bottom line is this: AidData makes it easier for a variety of users to ask questions and find answers using data, but the improvement of some of the data makes it very apparent how much work there is left to do in creating a comprehensive database of development finance. Searching AidData would help you find information on Kuwait & OPEC's contributions alongside the donors you'd find in other datasets (like the OECD CRS), but AidData is still constrained by the quality of the data made available by donors.

If you are aware of an improved data source we have yet to include, if you find errors in our existing data, or if you have questions about utilizing our data for your own research please contact us at info@aiddata.org.

Mapping For Results

William and Mary, Alena Stern ('12)

In about five minutes, any person armed with a computer and an internet connection can determine the exact amount of development assistance directed to the education sector in Uganda over the past 8 years. A quick query of the AidData website reveals that, since 2002, $643,103,401 (Constant 2000 USD) has been committed to the education sector in Uganda. Having this information at one’s fingertips is a huge step forward in aid transparency, but many people in the development field view this as merely a first step and see a need for more specific and accessible information on where the funding actually goes. Although AidData makes accessing a list of projects in the Ugandan education sector much easier, if I wanted to determine where within Uganda these projects are located, I would face a much more difficult task.

First, I might find myself looking for information that doesn’t exist. Many donors refuse to make their project documents public, making it nearly impossible to determine just where a project is implemented.

However, the problem is not always a dearth of information. With certain donors, the sheer volume of information actually makes accessibility a challenge. Let’s take the World Bank for example. Thanks to the Open Data Initiative announced in April 2010, all World Bank documentation is now publicly available. However, to find the sub-national location of a project, I would have to sort through hundreds of pages of PADs (Project Appraisal Documents), EAs (Environmental Assessments), ISDSs (Integrated Safeguard Data Sheets), PIDs (Project Information Documents), PPs (Project Papers) and other official documents. And then, in many cases, I still might be frustrated to discover that there is no concrete geographical information. I know this challenge well, as I spent six weeks of my summer working as a researcher on the Mapping for Results Initiative.

This new geo-coding initiative represents a partnership between AidData and the World Bank Institute. Over 6 weeks, our team of 13 interns geo-referenced all 1,216 active World Bank projects across 42 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, 27 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, Indonesia, and the Philippines along with a selection of African Development Bank projects. In total, we coded about 12,000 specific geographic locations, but hopefully this is just the beginning.

We geo-reference by recording each individual location targeted by a development aid project as mentioned in the documents referenced above, down to the most precise geo-graphic level possible--sometimes even down to the neighborhood level. In June of 2010 there was no requirement within the World Bank to systematically report this information in a standardized way. In response to the difficulties this presented to our research team, the World Bank is now experimenting with a pilot program to introduce standardized location reporting into future project documentation. After finding all the location names, we then “reference” each location by finding its latitude and longitude, so it can be universally referenced no matter how many times administrative divisions may change (which can be many, many times). For a longer and more entertaining discussion of geo-coding and this project, see this video, which has lots of cool maps, created by Aileen Boniface (Virginia Tech), Patricia Austria (College of William and Mary), and Kelsey Ranta (Georgetown University).

Why is geo-referencing important? First, geo-referencing allows for better donor coordination. Simply knowing what projects are underway in a certain country is not enough to avoid project duplication within a given region. If only national-level information is known, it is possible that the bulk of donor activity will be clustered in one region of the country while other regions are neglected. Empirically, this does occur, as this map of World Bank projects in Kenya overlaid on a map of poverty levels by district illustrates:

Second, geo-referencing is important because nations are not homogenous. As the variation in poverty levels within Kenya illustrates, levels of need are not constant across a country. This certainly holds true with sector-specific indicators of need, such as infant mortality in the health sector or primary school enrollment in the education sector. We could have a much richer picture of whether aid flows where it is most needed by looking beyond whether aid is flowing to the neediest countries to whether hospitals are being built in the districts with the worst health indicators, power plants are being constructed in the districts with the lowest levels of electrification, and wells are being built in the districts with least access to clean water. If aid were consistently targeted to the areas where it is most needed, aid dollars could more effectively deliver development results.

Finally, geo-referencing is critical in the effort to improve accountability and dialogue with recipients. Reinikka and Svensson (2005) illustrate the power of localized information in increasing the percentage of government expenditures on education that actually reach intended beneficiaries. After a public expenditure tracking survey (PETS) stated that in the mid 1990s, the average Ugandan school only received 20% of central government spending intended for the school, the government instituted a newspaper campaign to inform Ugandan citizens of what their schools were entitled to in central government expenditure. A second PETS in 2002 stated that in 2001 the average school received 80% of central government expenditure. Though the causality between the newspaper campaign and the reduction of local capture may not be confirmed, this example certainly illustrates the power of localized information to improve accountability and create results. Without the reduction in local capture, nearly $106 million of the $177 million of aid to education since 2002 would have been lost.

Geo-referencing creates the localized information that empowers recipients to hold their governments accountable and makes it possible to easily visualize aid information so it is accessible and understandable. Greater transparency doesn’t help recipients if the information they need is tied up in hundreds of pages of text. Information accessibility is even more important than availability. As illustrated by the map above, geo-referencing can produce visualizations that make the inequities of aid distribution within a recipient country immediately apparent.

Through this initiative, the World Bank has been a leader in making its data not only available, but also accessible. We hope that the Mapping for Results Initiative will encourage other donors to undertake the project of geo-referencing their data.

Donor Coordination in Kenya and Mozambique

The following is a post by two of our research assistants, Alena Stern (William and Mary '12) and Josh Powell (BYU Public Policy Graduate School '11)

Responding to long-held concerns about uncoordinated donor behavior, the Paris Declaration of 2005 made harmonization one of its five pillars, pledging to work towards “eliminating duplication of efforts and rationalizing donor activities to make them as cost-effective as possible.”

Among the problems of uncoordinated action are elevated transaction costs as recipient governments struggle to comply with variegated donor rules and procedures (Knack and Rahman 2007) and decreased donor specialization as “all donors seem to want to give to all sectors in all countries” (Easterly 2007).

All of the attention given to coordination problems begs the questions: how much do donors coordinate their activities? And is coordination effectively targeting needs within a country – both spatially (aid to villages or provinces) and sectorally (aid for different purposes)? Recent work by the World Bank – AidData partnership (Mapping for Results Initiative) sheds new light on the topic.

Using new geo-referenced aid data, we considered the spatial and sectoral coordination of all of the currently active projects of two donors – The World Bank and the African Development Bank – within Kenya and Mozambique. An AidData query places the World Bank and the AfDB as the first and twenty-third highest active donors to Kenya and Mozambique. Because of their influence, analyzing the funding patterns of these two donors offers a sense of where a large proportion of the funding to Kenya and Mozambique is going. (It also calls attention to the need to mainstream geo-referencing for the other approximately 50 active donors.)

World Bank and AfDB aid flows to Kenya demonstrate a tremendous concentration of aid from both donors in the Mombassa-Nairobi-Lake Victoria corridor. This is not entirely surprising, as these are the main population centers of Kenya, but this corridor is also comparatively much better off than the more arid North and East, which receives virtually no aid from either donor. Neither donor appears to be coordinating efforts nor effectively targeting the neediest areas of the country.

World Bank and AfDB aid flows to Kenya

The situation in Mozambique paints a different picture: AfDB projects are primarily directed to the northern parts of the country whereas World Bank projects are clustered near the capital city, Maputo. As in Kenya, however, there appear to be manifold financing gaps in the poorest parts of Mozambique, especially in the northwest provinces - Niassa and Tete - and the provinces just north of Maputo – Gaza and Inhambane. Geographic coordination in Mozambique is encouraging, yet the areas of greatest need appear to be neglected still.

World Bank and AfDB aid flows to Mozambique

Using the same active World Bank and AfDB projects, we then examined sectoral coordination. In Kenya, we find a high degree of sectoral specialization between the two donors. The AfDB is largely focused on central government budget support, allocating 58% of its spending towards this sector. By contrast, the World Bank’s emphasis has been Transportation (29%) and Agriculture (17%).

While the production sectors, such as transportation, power, and agriculture, receive a great deal of aid from both donors, sectors targeting human capital, such as education, health, and social services, are relatively neglected by both donors.

Sectoral coordination in Mozambique is quite different from Kenya: the Power and Transportation sectors are targeted heavily by both the World Bank and the AfDB. But beyond these two sectors, the World Bank and the AfDB spend on quite different purposes as shown below:

In Kenya, uncoordinated donor specialization may neglect particular sectors and geographic regions as the World Bank and the AfDB seem to target the same geographic area and the same sectors. In Mozambique, the donors specialize in different sectors and different areas. By cross referencing this finding with the distribution of sectorally-specific indicators of need, we could assess whether the different types of aid received by northern and southern Mozambique are tailored to the specific needs of those areas. It is possible that the geographic variation in aid portfolios is matched to the geographic variation in need. However, without more complete analysis, including a wider group of geo-coded donors, it is difficult to draw strong conclusions about the significance of the revealed patterns of sectoral and spatial coordination. Areas and sectors that appear neglected by the World Bank and AfDB might be covered by other donors. We would love the opportunity to test this proposition, but that would require that more donors geo-reference their own projects or provide access to their project documents so that we could geo-reference their projects as we have done for the World Bank and AfDB.

Geo-referencing development projects is one very promising method that could facilitate greater coordination and dialogue between policymakers and development practitioners, as well as researchers, NGOs, recipient governments, and citizens. As geo-referenced data become more common, donors and other interested parties (like us) can use the data to find and publicize areas and sectors that are not receiving an amount of aid that is proportional to need (measured in various objective ways). Such visualizations do not provide clear answers about where aid should be allocated, but they raise important questions with striking clarity and will encourage donors and recipient governments to explain allocation patterns to beneficiaries and taxpayers. We think this will improve the prospect of aid dollars arriving where they are needed most.

Bangladesh: Mapping climate change and food security

This post, co-written by Molly Norris of the World Bank and Joshua Powell of AidData, is cross-listed fromblogs.worldbank.org and shows a few ways to use geo-coded aid activity information:

Bangladesh can be described as “ground zero” at the intersection of climate change and food security.

The country is widely recognized as one of the places most vulnerable to the effects of a changing climate, which strains food systems alongside rapidly growing and urbanizing populations. Yet, despite these dual challenges, the World Bank expects Bangladesh will meet its Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving the number of people living in extreme poverty by 2015.

Given the impact of the global food crisis and numerous natural disasters, how is Bangladesh managing this feat? And can we map the country’s progress?

Questions like these are being tackled by an expanded Mapping for Results initiative that allows mash-ups between development indicators and project locations. AidData, a joint initiative of Brigham Young University, the College of William and Mary, and Development Gateway, is working with the World Bank to roll out 80+ new country maps and corresponding data during the Spring Meetings.

Mapping results in Bangladesh shows how swiftly Bank support has been distributed to reach people in need, and in locations where impact is greatest.

In late 2007, for example, food and fuel prices began increasing globally as the country recovered from a monsoon that affected almost half the population and internally displaced 11 million people. Then disaster struck a second time. A massive cyclone hit another half of the country’s districts and affected 8.7 million citizens.

This map shows the locations of the $383 million in Bank disaster response projects from 2008-2011 against a base map of the most disaster-prone areas in the country. Project locations are spread throughout damaged areas in the Western part of the country, with special concentration in the hard-hit Ganges Delta.

Rapid disbursements helped alleviate suffering and supported rebuilding shelters and coastal embankments. Notably, projects to secure clean water and prevent further flooding were launched in the population center and capital of Dhaka.

Food Crisis Response

The related food issue was not forgotten. Many disaster recovery projects contained components to regain lost production from agriculture and fisheries.

Despite recovery attempts, the magnitude of devastated harvests and livelihoods created another disaster: food prices in markets soared. Many Bangladeshis were forced to cut meals from their daily diets, eat lower quality food, and wait for hours in government queues for relief.

Again, the Bank responded with nationwide projects designed to improve food security through expanding access to agricultural technology, strengthening water supply, restoring livelihoods in disaster-affected areas, reducing environmental degradation, and improving municipal services throughout the country.

Achieving food security amid a global price crisis and challenging national conditions demanded investment beyond the hundreds of millions already devoted through disaster response.

The Bank committed an additional $593 million from 2008-2010. Projects were spread evenly across the country; larger disbursements focused on areas where population was densest.

Here, projects are mapped against a backdrop of recorded malnutrition levels by CIESIN:

The circles, dots and shaded overlays as seen on these maps represent a strategy in action at the confluence of food and climate change, an area critical to keeping the MDGs in sight.

Long-term projects to strengthen food systems and defend against the effects of climate change in Bangladesh are available in the Bank’s mapping portfolio by sector, at maps.worldbank.org/sa/bangladesh.

More solutions to the global food crisis will be discussed at the Open Forum, an April 14-15 global online discussion on the food crisis. Submit your own idea inspired by maps or your own experiences.

Development economics thinks big but also gets practical—postcard from Paris

SUBMITTED BY JUSTIN YIFU LIN

Development is about big systemic changes, complex tradeoffs, political choices and how the fruits of growth are channeled for the greater good. It is also about broadening opportunities – a goal that if neglected can result in frustrated citizens and tumult as we have seen in the North Africa and Middle East.

These were some of the many messages I took away from the ABCDE conference just held in Paris.

The arc of history and of social change were referenced often at this year’s conference, whether in terms of Amartya Sen discussing quoting John Stewart Mill and the need for ‘government by discussion’ or Daniel Cohen saying China would have had an industrial revolution in the 14th century if it weren’t for the Mongol invasion. Experts also presentedmodels of the world 30 years from now, by which time demographic shifts and a rising global middle class will have reshaped the economic power structure and where inequalitywithin countries may be a bigger source of perceived injustice than inequality between nations.

High joblessness, youth unemployment and gender inequality were topics treated with particular urgency, especially given the fact that youth unemployment is soaring in developed and developing countries alike. For this reason, the broadening opportunities theme of ABCDE 2011 was particularly appropriate.

I appreciated the humility shown by specialized researchers as well as by eminent policymakers and scholars. Angel Gurria, Secretary General of the OECD spoke at the opening and, during the question and answer session, said of the 2008 crisis, “we didn’t see the Mack truck coming.” The Korean Ambassador to the OECD, Kyung Wook Hur, noted at the Democratizing Development Economics event that Asian countries learned the hard way from the 1997 East Asia crisis that prudent banking requirements, fiscal probity and healthy reserves were needed to avoid a future crisis. The searing lessons from 1997 buffered Asia from bigger fall out from the recent crisis.

Social protection experts gave important presentations on the evaluation of Cash Transfer and other social protection programs in Latin America, Indonesia, and Africa as well as on weather shock insurance for farmers and rural workfare programs for millions of poor people in Ethiopia .

In other words, there was an urgency to the proceedings and a sense that economists are steering away from theoretical modeling toward pragmatic field work, randomized control trials and projects and programs done in partnership with experts in developing countries.

Structural transformation in Africa in terms of labor reallocation from agriculture to service sector, the decline of manufacturing sector, and the productivity gap between agricultural and nonagricultural sectors were also explored.

The ‘Democratizing Development Economics’ round table [link to webcast] on the final day surfaced important views about how low income people can be more engaged in designing development solutions and it highlighted the knotty problems of data collection and ownership. The debate brought into high relief a dilemma that faces development practitioners every day. That is the reality of statistical agencies being underfunded, of ministries not sharing data with each other, and of some large countries – in developing and advanced countries alike – resisting sharing their data.

It was fascinating to hear the views of Mustapha Nabli, who now heads Tunisia’s central bank, regarding how transparency and accountability of governments to citizens is linked to the accuracy of country statistics. He highlighted how important this issue was for Tunisia as it moved through a wrenching revolution. People need to trust the growth numbers and have some say in how data are disseminated.

Desire Vencatachellum, Director for Research at the African Development Bank, stressed that the telling of development stories through data and knowledge can be even more compelling if the narrative comes from Africans themselves. In this sense, having African academics, researchers and policymakers heard at every level and empowering them to communicate is essential. As he said, the distance between work in the field and sophisticated development theory is still often too far.

Martine Durand, who heads the data and statistics team at OECD, spoke about the Better Life index and its potential for democratizing development economics as well. She talked about how the index grew out of an intensive consultative process and about how it allows users to compare well being based on 11 dimensions.

Breakthrough work deploying young people in India as part of an annual ‘Status of Education’ report to collect data on educational attainment in several states in India was described by Esther Duflo of JPAL at MIT. She explained how the pioneering work of the grassroots group Pratham, was successfully adapted and applied in a slightly different manner in several African countries.

Martin Ravallion, Director of Research at the Bank, talked about how Open Data is transforming the way we share statistics and research and about how important it is to get the tools for undertaking original research into the hands of a wider group of up and coming students and researchers in the developing world.

So the globalization of development thinking took a few more strides in the right direction and I hope readers will check out the rich ABCDE website where many new papers and presentations, as well as webcasts, can be downloaded.

National Ganga River Basin Project

National Ganga River Basin Project

The Ganga is India's most important river. Its sprawling basin accounts for one-fourth of the country's water resources and is home to more than 400 million Indians - or some one third of India's population. The river's 2,500 km journey from its glacial source in the Himalayas to its enormous fan-shaped delta in the Bay of Bengal traverses five Indian states along the mainstem, enriching huge swathes of agricultural plains, and sustaining a long procession of towns and cities.

As India's holiest river, the Ganga has a cultural and spiritual significance that far transcends the boundaries of its basin. It is worshipped as a living goddess, and since time immemorial, people from across the country have come to the many historic temple towns on its banks to pray and bathe in its waters.

Despite this iconic status and religious heritage, the Ganga today is facing formidable pollution pressures and associated threats to its biodiversity and environmental sustainability. An ever-growing population, inadequately planned urbanization and industrialization have affected water quality in the river. Today, the waters of the Ganga are sullied by sewage, as well as solid and industrial waste generated by human and economic activity along its banks.

Map of the Ganga Basin

The absence of adequate infrastructure to manage these extreme pollution pressures means that water quality in the Ganga has deteriorated in recent decades. Today, only one-third of the sewage generated by the towns and cities on the main stem of the river is treated, and untreated or poorly treated industrial wastewater is responsible for 20 per cent of all wastewater inflows into the river. In fact, the Ganga is so severely polluted, especially in its critical middle stretch, that its waters are unfit not just for drinking but even for bathing.

Fecal Coliform Levels

The Government of India has tried in the past to tackle the growing pollution in the Ganga through the Ganga Action Plan. While the program had limited success in cleaning up the river, it needed to improve its implementation.

Building on lessons from the past, the Government of India has developed a comprehensive vision for clean-up and conservation of the Ganga, beginning with the establishment of the National Ganga River Basin Authority (NGRBA) in 2009. The NGRBA has the mandate to develop a multi-sectoral program for ensuring that after 2020 no untreated municipal or industrial wastewater will be allowed to flow into the Ganga.

World Bank Support

The World Bank is supporting the Government of India in its efforts to achieve this national goal. At a meeting between the Minister of State (independent charge) for Environment & Forests, Jairam Ramesh, and the President of the World Bank Robert Zoellick in December 2009, it was agreed that the Bank would provide long-term support to the NGRBA Program, which will include developing and strengthening the institutions needed to implement it, and financing priority infrastructure investments.

The $1.556 billion National Ganga River Basin Project, with $1 billion in financing from the World Bank Group, including $199 million interest-free IDA credit and $801 million low-interest IBRD loan, was approved by the Bank's Board of Executive Directors on 31 May 2011 and will be implemented over eight years. The Project will support the National Ganga River Basin Authority (NGRBA) in:

Building the capacity of its nascent operational-level institutions so that they can manage the long-term Ganga clean-up and conservation program.
- Apart from dedicated operational-level institutions at the Central and state level, the Project will also help the NGRBA set up a state-of-the-art Ganga Knowledge Centre to act as a repository for knowledge relevant for the conservation of the Ganga.
- While NGRBA will fund investments (like sewage treatment plants, sewer networks etc) that are critical for reducing pollution in the Ganga, it is the cities and municipalities that will have to be responsible for managing and maintaining them in the long run. The Project will help build the capacity of city-level service providers responsible for running these assets and also modernize their systems for doing so.
- The Project will also help strengthen the Central and State Pollution Control Boards for better monitoring the pollution in the Ganga, by modernizing their information systems and providing staff training. The Project will also finance the upgradation of the Ganga water quality monitoring system, as well as carry out an inventory of all the sources of pollution that affect water quality in the Ganga.
- One of the reasons why earlier efforts to clean the Ganga did not take root was the lack of public participation. The various stakeholders, including the communities living along the river, the pilgrims, and the industries located in the river catchment did not fully appreciate the need for changing everyday practices that were polluting the river. The Project will help the NGRBA devise and implement communications programs to encourage people to participate in the clean-up program.
Implementing some demonstrative investments for reducing point-source pollution at priority locations on the Ganga. The Project will finance pilots for new technologies or implementation arrangements, which could be transformative if successful and replicated on scale. The individual investments will be selected in accordance with the Framework for investments developed for the NGRBA Program.

Tamil Nadu Helps its Poorest Help Themselves

At Brazil summit, World Bank and international coalition pledge to reduce greenhouse gases

By Associated Press,

SAO PAULO — The World Bank and 40 cities from around the world joined forces Wednesday with a pledge to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The bank reached the agreement with the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, a coalition founded in 2005 with the aim of reducing carbon emissions. Its chairman is New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

( Andre Penner / Associated Press ) - Former President Bill Clinton delivers a speech, as Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City, second left, Sao Paulo’s Mayor Gilberto Kassab, and World Bank’s President Robert Zoelick, right, listen during the C40 Large Cities Climate Summit in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Wednesday, June 1, 2011.

Bloomberg, World Bank President Robert Zoellick and former President Bill Clinton announced the new partnership during the opening session of the C40 Large Cities Climate Summit.

All three say the partnership will help cities to finance projects aimed at reducing carbon emissions while also supporting growth.

“The leaders of C40 Cities — the world’s megacities — hold the future in their hands,” Bloomberg said. “This unique partnership with the World Bank will help solve many of the problems that cities face in obtaining financing for climate-related projects, both from the World Bank and other lenders.”

According to the World Bank, C40 cities account for 8 percent of the global population, 12 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and 21 percent of the world’s global gross domestic product.

In his speech, Zoellick said the agreement will help cities “integrate growth planning with climate-change adaptation and mitigation, with special attention to the vulnerabilities of the urban poor.”

Clinton added that the partnership “will provide essential tools to help cities become more sustainable, grow their economies, create jobs, promote energy independence, and ensure a stable future for generations to come.”