ADePT: a Great Software for Data & Analytical Reports

 

SUBMITTED BY IHSSANE ON  Growth & Crisis

ADePT, the Software Platform for Automated Economic Analysis, is a free program designed to simplify and speed-up the production of analytical reports. Created by the Research Department (DECRG) of the World Bank, it can be used to extract indicators from micro-level surveys and present them in a print-ready form. ADePT can generate sets of about 50 print-ready tables and graphs in different areas of economic analysis, and already includes, among others, modules on Poverty, Inequality, Labor, Gender, Education, Health, and Social Protection.

ADePT helps both to minimize human errors and to introduce new techniques and methods to a wide audience of practitioners. It can be used as a tool for sensitivity analysis, data checking, and simulations – it’s an ideal tool for training! Tasks that take several weeks of work from qualified consultants could be accomplished within minutes using ADePT. Furthermore, by producing a standard set of tables and graphs, the program allows standardization of the economic statistics among countries expanding the possibilities for research on intra-country comparisons.

The website contains a free, downloadable version of the software, as well as video tutorials in several languages, PowerPoint presentations, examples and more about how to use ADePT by utilizing different data sets. Please visit www.worldbank.org/adept for more information.

 

The current version of ADePT requires a prior installation of the STATA software, but updates might be available in the near future to bypass this requirement.

 

Latin Indigenous Peoples Hard Hit by Climate Change

 

SUBMITTED BY TOM GRUBISICH ON Development Marketplace

ome 28 million members of Indigenous Peoples live in Latin America, many of them in poverty and prone to flooding and other weather extremes caused or exacerbated by climate change.  A number of finalist projects aim to give Indigenous Peoples in Latin America a cushion against weather extremes.

Here’s a sampling of the projects:

In Mexico, ITESM at Tecnologico de Monterrey seeks “to help people from Tutuaca, Otachique, and Conoachi communities in Chihuahua through a biocultural rescuing program to maintain native maize genetic diversity facing climate change needs, including validation and verification mechanisms to preserve their diverse maize races.”

In Peru, an organization of women from four communities in the High Andean region proposes “to recover ancestral knowledge and techniques to mitigate the effects of cold spells, reducing the vulnerability of 2,758 comuneros belonging to 551 families in the district of Palca.”

In El Savador, Instituto para en Rescate Ancestral Indigena Salvadoreno  (RAIS) seeks to “recover, divulge, and make people aware of the knowledge of 100 wise indigenous women regarding the properties and interpretation of the language of both climate and earth as a support tool to prevent climate-change risks.” READ MORE »

 

 

Scaling Up Social Accountability

 

SUBMITTED BY DARSHANA PATEL ON  People, Spaces, Deliberation

Strengthening accountability relationships between policy makers, service providers and citizens is at the core of the public accountability effort. But because traditional, supply-side interventions alone have not been able to deliver expected development outcomes; governance practitioners, civil society and policy-makers are increasingly looking towards citizen-driven, social accountability processes to strengthen governance and service delivery. The two approaches must be integrally linked. If governance and accountability are central to the development agenda, social accountability interventions must be a part of this agenda as well. Most governance practitioners would agree on this point.

READ MORE »

 

Making Parliaments Work through Better Communication

 

SUBMITTED BY PAUL MITCHELL ON  People, Spaces, Deliberation

Governments and development agencies have devoted many years and hundreds of millions of dollars developing democratic governance in countries around the world. The idea of creating democracies is still the primary driver of many governance improvement agendas. Clearly, democratic systems often bring with them improvements in governance and economic development, but simply putting a democracy into place is not enough.

Last week, this blog featured a quote by Elinor Ostrom, which contains an interesting sentence: “Yet I worry that the need for continuous civic engagement, intellectual struggle, and vigilance is not well understood in some of our mature democracies and is not transmitted to citizens and officials in new democracies….We have to avoid slipping into a naïve sense that democracy – once established – will continue on its own momentum.” READ MORE »

 

One Minute to Save the World

 

SUBMITTED BY KAVITA WATSA ON  Development In A Changing Climate

A friend sent me the link to “One Minute to Save the World”, an interesting campaign that is inviting one-minute films from people across the world who care about climate change. The organizers are offering £1,000 as first prize for the best film, and there’s a nice line-up of films already. The panel of judges is a qualified one, and includes a number of well-known names, from Shekhar Kapur, Oscar-winning director, to Franny Armstrong of The Age of Stupid fame.

READ MORE »

 

Environmental action and the action of others

 

SUBMITTED BY ROBERT CIALDINI ON Development In A Changing Climate

The results of a large survey I conducted with my fellow environmental researcher, Wes Schultz, produced a pair of actionable results. First, people who thought their neighbors were conserving energy were more likely to conserve themselves. Second, at the same time, almost all of the nearly 3,000 survey respondents underestimated the conservation efforts of their neighbors. This suggests a simple way to increase conservation activity—by trumpeting the true levels of conservation that are going unrecognized.

To investigate this idea, we examined resource conservation choices in an entirely different setting—upscale hotel rooms, where guests often encounter a card asking them to reuse their towels. As anyone who travels frequently knows, although the wording of this card may vary somewhat, it always requests compliance for the sake of the environment. What the card never says, however, is that the great majority of guests do, in fact, reuse their towels when given the opportunity. We suspected that this omission was costing the hotels—and the environment—plenty. READ MORE »

 

Online mapping tool gives view of forests in developing countries

SUBMITTED BY JAMES I DAVISON ON  East Asia & Pacific On The Rise

In July, biodiversity specialist and blogger Tony Whitten wrote a post about not abandoning old-fashioned conservation techniques as an important method of taking positive action on climate change. One of the important old-school mitigation methods, he wrote, lies in protecting the world’s forests through reforestation and avoiding further deforestation.

Accordingly, a big part of the ongoing climate change discussion includes reducing emissions through deforestation and degradation (known as REDD). And the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization now offers a tool to help monitor forests in developing countries. Using satellite imagery and other data, the Global Forest Resources Assessment Portal displays the information on an interactive map. READ MORE »

Another Reason Why Aid to Africa Must Increase

SUBMITTED BY SHANTA ON AFRICA CAN END POVERTY BLOG OF WORLD BANK

Cliquez ici pour lire ce post en français

Given its massive development deficits and the effects of the global economic crisis, many observers,included me, are calling for increased aid to Africa. Most of these appeals are based on Africa’s need for more resources.  But there is a different argument.

Aid to Africa is today as productive as it has ever been.

Craig Burnside and David Dollaridentified a group of policies (including fiscal stability and low trade barriers) that strengthened the link between foreign aid and per capita income growth. These are the very policies that African governments have been improving over the past decade.

Even after the onset of the global economic crisis, and despite the fears that these… READ MORE »

What AIDS Leaves Behind: A Heavy Burden on African Women

SUBMITTED BY KATHLEEN BEEGLE ON AFRICA CAN END POVERTY BLOG of World bank

Unlike other diseases in Africa (malaria, tuberculosis, intestinal worms, etc.), which mainly affect the young and the old, HIV/AIDS takes its toll on prime-age adults during the most productive years of their lives. The death of an adult family member can have large consequences for the surviving family. Given prevailing social norms in many African societies, the burden may likely be heaviest for women.

Most studies focus on the consequences for orphaned children – their schooling and health. We know less about how older adults are impacted.  In our study, we track individuals and their households in northwest Tanzania, an area of high HIV prevalence in the 1990s, over a 13-year period.

We find that, when a family member dies, women (even old women) end up working more on the farm; men do too, but not as much.  Having an asset such as goats enables them to work less. READ MORE »

Source: http://blogs.worldbank.org/africacan/

Are China’s banks having a “good crisis”?

The crisis certainly hit China hard, but the spillover to banks has been minimal thus far.Photo courtesy of randylane under a Creative Commons license.

The story of the current financial crisis is well-known now and much has been written.  Indeed, we’re now at the point where many observers are indicating that the crisis is now at an end.  It would seem that the immediate financial sector impacts are leveling off, but in many countries the economic recovery will likely take a long time.  However, a number of emerging markets have come out of the crisis in relatively stable shape.  China is the most prominent example.  In fact, one might say that China is having a “good crisis” in certain ways as it has lifted its prominence – it is the one large country seen as leading the world out of this global crisis.  The same applies for China’s financial system given that many of its banks are now the largest in the world and (at least on the surface) posting strong performance. … READ MORE »

Source: http://blogs.worldbank.org/eastasiapacific/are-china-s-banks-having-a-good-crisis