Addressing Africa’s extreme water insecurity
Access to clean, affordable, and safe drinking water is both a fundamental human right recognized by the United Nations and Goal 6 of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals. However, access to this essential resource in Africa is not yet universal, with 1 in 3 Africans facing water scarcity and approximately 400 million people in sub-Saharan Africa lacking access to a basic drinking water. Access to water remains a pervasive development issue across the continent, as a 2019 report by the World Resources Institute (WRI) revealed: Indeed, addressing climate change and poor management of water resources and services is paramount to tackling Africa’s water stress.
Aqueduct, an online geographic information system (GIS) tool produced by the WRI to map global water-related risks, reveals Africa’s extensive exposure to water-related risks (Figure 1). Their model accounts for a variety of metrics, such as vulnerability to floods and droughts, water stress, and seasonal variability. “Extremely high water risk,” demarcated in dark red, covers large swaths of arid northern Africa, southern Africa, and eastern Africa. However, water risk throughout the continent is quite heterogeneous, as light patches, such as those along the Nile River, are interspersed with the areas suffering from critically high water risk. The equatorial and tropical regions around the Democratic Republic of the Congo also enjoy significant surface area with noticeably less water risk than their continental neighbors.
Figure 1. Africa faces some of the highest water risk in the world
Source: “Climate Change Is Hurting Africa’s Water Sector, but Investing in Water Can Pay Off,” World Resources Institute, 2019.
The authors maintain that understanding the continent’s water risk factors is an essential prerequisite to instituting changes to the poor management of its water resources and services, alongside bolstering climate resilience. As such, the authors highlight several areas within the water sector that require investment to improve climate resilience and better public service delivery.
Africa’s agricultural sector, the authors claim, is poised to face significant exposure to water-related climate risks in the future. As 90 percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s rural population depends on agriculture as their primary source of income and more than 95 percent of the region’s farming is reliant on rainfall, the consequences of unpredictable rainfall, rising temperatures, extreme drought, and lower crop yields expose one of Africa’s poorest communities to increasingly intense climate- and water-related hazards. Considering these hazards, WRI proposes that intergovernmental risk-pooling mechanisms, such as the African Union’s African Risk Capacity (ARC), could be increasingly important sovereign insurance mechanisms to mitigate climate disasters, as they provide faster payouts than humanitarian aid.
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The effort will be expensive: According to the authors, securing universal safe drinking water, sanitation, and hygiene in sub-Saharan Africa requires $35 billion per annum in capital costs. While efficient “smart design” of water management systems can promote greater climate resilience for water and sanitation services, the WRI attributes securing adequate revenue to maintain new infrastructure as the biggest challenge facing African policymakers and engineers in the water sector.
Investing in climate-resilient green infrastructure provides a myriad of benefits throughout the economy, namely, generating jobs, alleviating poverty, and diminishing the impact of climate change on Africa’s most vulnerable and marginalized communities. African governments, according to the WRI, should actively factor in these water risks to develop infrastructure systems that protect people, save money in the long run, and preserve the delicate ecosystems that their economies and the livelihood of their citizens depend upon.
For more on climate change in Africa, read “Figure of the week: Climate change and African agriculture,” “Climate adaptation and the great reset for Africa,” and “Africa can play a leading role in the fight against climate change.”
What lessons can Africa learn from India’s COVID-19 crisis?
India is unlikely to be the last country encountering catastrophic outbreaks as the COVID-19 pandemic persists and evolves. The lessons from India’s experience are especially relevant to other developing countries, like those in Africa, that will not benefit from the shield of mass vaccination in the near term. The overarching lesson is that COVID-19 is a “complacency virus”; its surveillance and suppression must be continually adapted.
The Indian second-wave outbreak is considered by the World Health Organization to have stemmed from the evolution of the highly transmissible B.1.617 or delta variant of the coronavirus, but catalyzed by a series of religious and political mass gathering events and reduced public health and social measures.
The delta variant was first reported in October 2020 and declared the fourth “variant of concern” by the WHO on May 11, 2021. In India, the spread of delta has dominated even that of the alpha B.1.1.7 variant (first identified in Kent, England), which itself was found to be 40-50 percent more transmissible than the original COVID-19 strain from Wuhan. Current estimates are that Delta could be a further 60 percent more transmissible than Alpha.
Public-health policymakers, having become accustomed to less aggressive variants, appear to have been caught off guard by the delta variant. In fact, on February 21, 2021, Indian officials announced they had “defeated COVID-19.” A subsequent reduction in adherence to public health and safety measures was accompanied by an outright reduction in the stringency of COVID-19 protective measures in India, with the lockdown stringency index (a measure of public health and social measures) declining in March 2021 to its lowest value since the start of the pandemic. From mid-March to April a series of potential superspreader mass gatherings were permitted, including the attendance of an estimated 9.1 million pilgrims at the Kumbh Mela religious festival, and political campaigning for state elections in West Bengal, Assam, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu.
The result, as we are now aware, has been the catastrophic and deadly spread of a second wave of COVID-19 across India and elsewhere in the world. The lessons for African countries are twofold.
Lesson 1: Virus surveillance is key to stopping the pandemic
First, as the COVID-19 pandemic matures, so must virus surveillance. The evolution of new variants has emerged as one of the most important risk factors for outbreaks. Genomic sequencing helps build an early warning system for identifying the emergence of variants of concern, as well as the spread of these variants between countries. Doing so better informs public-health policymaking.
Already, the United Kingdom—a leader in COVID-19 genomic sequencing—has reviewed and adjusted reopening schedules on the basis of risk analysis that incorporates the emergence and spread of the delta variant. Genomic sequencing data in South Africa helped determine a change in vaccination strategy in response to the emergence of the beta (B.1.351) variant, which appeared more resistant to certain vaccines.
Unfortunately, Africa’s sequencing capacity remains extremely limited with almost half of African countries unable to share any genomic sequencing data on COVID-19 variants. African countries, accordingly, have an overclouded early-warning system with little visibility over emerging risks or the circulation of variants of concern. The WHO now encourages countries to “strengthen surveillance and sequencing capacities and apply a systematic approach to provide a representative indication of the extent of transmission of [COVID-19] variants based on the local context, and to detect unusual events.”
African countries have had considerable success in regional approaches to fighting COVID-19—including the Pan-African Medical Supplies Platform, harmonized “safe trade” protocols, and the work of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A regional approach to variant surveillance through regional sequencing hubs is now needed to pool resources and technical capacities. Development partners can assist in building this regional capacity through initiatives such as the U.K.’s New Variant Assessment Platform.
Lesson 2: Avoid complacency
The second lesson for Africa is simply to avoid complacency. Most African countries seem to have, so far, been spared the depth of crises experienced in other regions in the fight against COVID-19. As the Indian case shows, situations can deteriorate rapidly. In many of the African countries in which case sequencing data is available, the delta variant is on the rise. Policymakers must remain on top of evolving knowledge and preparations against COVID-19.
This can involve learning from outbreaks elsewhere and adapting capacity bottlenecks accordingly, as has been the case in Kenya, in which oxygen concentration machinery was imported to Nairobi’s Metropolitan Hospital following the experience of COVID-19 related oxygen shortages in India.
The evidence suggests that, overall, African countries are continuing to face the COVID-19 crisis with vigilance and caution. The stringency of the lockdown measures imposed by African countries has remained roughly constant since November 2020, notwithstanding some country idiosyncrasy. This is perhaps not particularly surprising; until mass vaccination is extended to developing countries, including those in Africa, they face little choice but invasive lockdown measures for supressing COVID-19, and, indirectly, their economies.
Unfortunately, mass vaccination remains distant upon the African horizon. Expediting it continues to be the ultimate prize for African policymakers and their development partners. Until then however, carefully following the lessons from India and other countries will continue to help African countries to manage their COVID-19 responses and make fully informed public health and economic make decisions.
Figure 6. Stringency of Africa’s lockdowns over time, scale of 1 to 100 (white to red), January 2020 to June 2021
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The economic benefits of cities in the developing world
Dulani Chunga moved from a safe, quiet but poor village in Malawi to Blantyre, the prime business city, in the hopes of changing his destiny. He was drawn to the city by stories of streetlights, the opportunity to make money, and the chance to send his children to school. He lives in Ndirande, an immense slum with squalid conditions. While his income is higher than what it used to be in his village, it is barely enough to feed his family of four—food and shelter cost a lot more in Blantyre.
The fortunes of many Dulanis are stuck in a low-development trap of developing-country cities. Yet, evidence increasingly highlights the productivity advantages of living and working in dense cities, particularly in the developing world. While productivity benefits of density, measured as the elasticity of wages with respect to density, are significant for developed country cities—0.043 in the United States and 0.03 in France—some recent estimates for developing countries are multiples higher: 0.19 in China, 0.12 in India, and 0.17 in Africa. What do these estimates tell us? A 10 percent increase in density increases productivity by 1.7 percent in Africa compared to 0.4 percent in the United States. These estimates appear implausible if we take Dulani’s experience into perspective. More broadly, 54 percent of Africa’s urban population lives in slums and 38 percent in South Asia.
How do we reconcile these elasticity estimates with reality? In a recent working paper, we examine more than 1,200 estimates of urban productivity from 70 studies covering 33 countries from 1973 to 2020. In addition, we constructed new estimates to show how urban costs, with respect to crime, congestion, and pollution, changed with density. For this, we collected data from hundreds of cities around the world, including several in developing countries.
A quick look suggests high agglomeration economies in developing countries
A casual glimpse at productivity estimates measured through wage premiums shows that these are on average nearly 5 points higher in developing countries (Figure 1).
Figure 1. People in developing countries appear to benefit more by living in cities
Source: Agglomeration Economies in Developing Countries: A Meta-Analysis.Note: This figure computes unweighted average wage elasticity estimates for each country using individual worker data for the non-services sector (reflecting either manufacturing or the entire economy). This comprises two-thirds of the developing country estimates. It reflects 271 raw elasticity estimates (144 in non-high-income countries), aggregated across different studies with different methodologies.
A broader examination tells a different story
A meta-analysis is a technique that helps explain differences in estimates across studies based on their attributes, including methodology, time period of the study, and so on. For example, studies estimating agglomeration benefits using nominal wages or labor productivity have elasticities that are 6.3 and 4.3 percentage points higher than those using total factor productivity (TFP). This suggests that part of the wage premium is driven by higher capital intensity, perhaps a result of thicker capital markets, in urban areas, rather than efficiency or spillovers per se.
Some studies also control for the fact that skilled workers are attracted to dense cities that make them productive. These studies include human capital controls such as an individual’s education, lowering agglomeration gains. Finally, econometric analysis that employs panel fixed effects, thereby controlling for the selection of better workers or firms, lowers estimates by about 1.8 percentage points. Once such study-level idiosyncrasies are accounted for, elasticity estimates for developing countries are only 1 percentage point higher than those for developed countries (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Agglomeration premiums on labor productivity nearly disappear after controlling for urban costs
Source: Agglomeration Economies in Developing Countries: A Meta-Analysis.Note: The figure uses a rope-ladder representation of a subset of the estimated coefficients from the meta-analysis model. The meta-analysis probes into the factors—methodological, data-related, controls—that influence agglomeration elasticity estimates. The methodology for meta-analysis minimizes the Bayesian Information Criterion. Using the standard errors of the coefficients, it also plots the 90 percent confidence intervals, where standard errors are clustered at the study level. Similar estimated coefficients are obtained by model selection using the Akaike Information Criterion or Bayesian Model Averaging methods.
Agglomeration premia should reflect the higher cost of working in cities (such as higher housing costs or time lost in transport) or compensation for urban disamenities such as pollution and crime. But most empirical work does not factor in these costs. Our meta-analysis shows that studies controlling for urban costs would estimate net agglomeration benefits to be 0.1 percent for high-income countries and 1 percent for non-high-income countries when using labor productivity as the outcome. These results are in line with French and Colombian data, suggesting that the net benefits from city size are close to being flat.
Our estimates on the extent of urban disamenities with respect to pollution, congestion, and crime suggests that urban disamenities are higher in developing countries. For the average city density, in high-income countries 19-30 percent fewer hours are spent in traffic congestion, pollution is 16-28 percent lower, and the homicide rate is around four times lower. In particular, the elasticity of the homicide rate is positive and very high (24 percent) in developing countries and negative (56 percent) in developed countries. This suggests that if urban costs pertaining to crime are accounted for, the magnitude of net agglomeration elasticity in developing countries would be smaller or even negative.
Are cities in developing countries different?
The findings from our systematic meta-analysis and estimates on cost elasticities support Dulani’s view on the ground. People in developing countries are concentrating—but not because they are attaining the productivity benefits of urbanizing. Developing-country cities are generally dense but not productive, and they are crime-ridden and polluted to boot. This evolution is consistent with what has been called “premature urbanization.”
In light of these findings, can we really hope that the migration of people from villages to dysfunctional cities will pull them out of poverty? The experiences of China and South Korea suggest that cities become productive when urbanization is accompanied by industrial dynamism and broader structural transformation of the national economy. Developing countries ought to focus on removing distortions that limit structural transformation that creates the impetus for spatial transformation. It is only then that cities will attain economic density, achieve higher productivity, and live up to the hopes of many more Dulanis to come.
Training and support for female entrepreneurs in Vietnam: What do women want and need?
Considered one of the world’s poorest countries in the 1980s, Vietnam today has emerged as a rising star in Asia with impressive economic and social progress. By 2035, Vietnam aims to graduate from lower- to upper-middle income status, and become a prosperous, creative, equitable, and democratic society. As women are half of the population and women’s economic empowerment increases social and economic benefits, creating more female entrepreneurs is a central part of the government’s agenda. According to the National Strategy on Gender Equality for 2021-2030, the Vietnamese government expects to see more women business owners in the coming years, accounting for 27 percent of all enterprises by 2025 and 30 percent by 2030.
Reality
Over the past three decades, Vietnam has shown steady signs of progress in increasing its number of women entrepreneurs. Beginning with the Private Enterprises Law introduced in 1990, legislation has moved toward being more comprehensive and gender-inclusive, with women-owned SMEs (small- and medium-sized enterprises) mentioned for the first time in the Law on Support for Small- and Medium-sized Enterprises in 2017. In 2020, Vietnam ranked second in Southeast Asia and 25th globally in terms of women’s business ownership, according to the Mastercard Index of Women Entrepreneurs.
The statistics, however, are not very encouraging if we take a deeper look at women’s entrepreneurial participation. The percentage of women-owned business is still lower than the indicator set for 2020 (26.5 versus 35), and 99 percent of these are micro-, small-, and medium-sized enterprises concentrated in lower productivity sectors. In the economic downturn due to the COVID-19 pandemic, half of these enterprises were partially suspended or temporarily dissolved. Furthermore, the rate of women-owned businesses reporting decline in revenues of 75 percent or greater in the first quarter of 2020 was almost double that of their male counterparts.
The question is, what is holding back Vietnamese women entrepreneurs?
The question is, what is holding back Vietnamese women entrepreneurs? The literature shows a multitude of challenges faced by female entrepreneurs in Vietnam, including discriminatory social and cultural norms and beliefs, limited access to financing, inadequate knowledge of information and communication technologies (ICTs), lack of social networks and opportunities for capacity building, and gender-biased or even gender-blind legislation. These challenges obviously affect women’s ability to realize their entrepreneurial ambitions.
Action
A startup’s success is correlated with its founder’s investment in knowledge. Education, therefore, becomes a gateway to a brighter future for women entrepreneurs. While lack of access to training represents a significant hindrance for women, the wrong types of training and support can be an even bigger barrier. In other words, developing suitable interventions and policy strategies is no easy feat. A review of capacity building for women entrepreneurs in Vietnam conducted in 2020 revealed that existing training programs are neither demand-driven nor gender-sensitive.
Prior research suggests that training programs can fail if we do not understand learner wants and needs from the beginning. This is especially true for entrepreneurship training, as the needs and preferences of learners may vary depending on gender, stage of venture development, and the environment within which the entrepreneurs operate. Evidence, therefore, is needed to better understand Vietnamese female entrepreneurs’ learning needs and preferences to inform practices and support policies for more effective women’s entrepreneurship education and training.
To fill this gap, I will dedicate my time at Brookings as an Echidna Global Scholar to building the evidence base around Vietnamese women entrepreneurs’ perceived learning needs and preferences—the starting points for the intervention and policy development process. My hope is that the findings that emerge from qualitative interviews with participants from a women’s entrepreneurship training program in Vietnam and successful women in business, as well as state and nonstate policy actors, will support the development of future gender-responsive policies and programs for women’s entrepreneurship in Vietnam. This in turn will accelerate the growth of women-owned businesses to achieve the national development agenda.
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What India’s COVID-19 crisis means for Africa
By May 9, 2021 India accounted for 57 percent of new COVID-19 cases anywhere in the world.
This phenomenon rippled through the interconnected economies of the world, including those in Africa. Indeed, India has risen over the past decade to become Africa’s thirdmost-important trading partner, after the European Union and China. In fact, the African market is precariously dependent on Indian suppliers for certain products, notably pharmaceuticals and rice. This is especially the case of East Africa, in which 35 percent of pharmaceutical imports come from India, and 20 percent of rice.
As India’s second COVID-19 wave raged, a concern for African countries has been the potential for economic and trade-related spillovers channeled through these trade sensitivities. There is a precedent. At the start of the pandemic, in April 2020, Indian rice traders were forced to suspend exports amid disruptions to transport links, and maritime shipping and production bottlenecks caused by lockdown restrictions imposed to suppress the spread of the virus. In a United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) survey of African businesses across the continent in July 2020, companies reported switching suppliers as a result of sourcing disruptions, with 56 percent finding equivalent products and favouring national and regional suppliers.
Fortunately, the supply-side disruptions seen in early 2020 have not substantively materialized, but the recent soaring numbers in India have complicated things for the continent. Indeed, India is more than your average country in the face of a health pandemic and is also quite notably the “vaccine factory of the world.” In being forced to redirect COVID-19 vaccine exports domestically to fight its current outbreak, India is estimated to have left COVAX with a shortfall of 190 million doses by just the end of June.
Though countries across the world are also facing the vulnerabilities of having been too dependent on Indian vaccine supplies, it is developing and least-developed countries that are most dependent on COVAX and have already fallen behind in vaccination rates. According to WHO Africa, while the world—as of mid-June—had administered 29 doses per 100 people, African countries had managed just 1.5 doses per 100 people. (Note that this Africa figure excludes Morocco, which is an outlier on the continent as a large economy with an exceptionally high vaccination rate.) A scenario is emerging in which well-vaccinated rich countries like Israel, the United States, and the United Kingdom begin reopening their economies while African and other developing countries face persisting lockdown restrictions and stifled economic recoveries.
The Indian outbreak exacerbates this uneven recovery scenario. Of the vaccine doses received in Africa as of mid-May, by the time Indian supply disruptions had begun, almost one-half were from COVAX, with bilaterally negotiated supplies accounting for most of the remainder and AVATT deliveries expected in significant quantities only in the third quarter of 2021. In turn, in the three rounds of COVAX allocations the vast majority of doses (237 million) have been of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, almost all of which were made by the Serum Institute India. Only 15.4 million have been Pfizer-BioNTech, produced in a number of other sites outside India. The need to redirect Indian vaccines is estimated to have left COVAX with a shortfall of 190 million doses.
With vaccine exports from India banned until at least October, supply shortages in the COVAX initiative are likely to substantively delay the African vaccine drive and, in turn, any end to the pandemic on the continent.
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Fortunately, Africa is not helpless. Over the short-to-medium term it will be important for African countries to consider diversifying vaccine supplies. Strategies might include raising the number of approved vaccines in supply portfolios and diversifying acquisition channels, contracted manufacturers, and the geographical mix of suppliers. The 870 million vaccine doses pledged to COVAX by the G-7 at their meeting in June is a welcome start.
Over the medium to long term, African countries must increasingly look to local manufacturing of vaccines. With momentum shifting behind a World Trade Organization waiver on intellectual property rights protections for vaccines, African countries may have opportunities for expanding and ramping up vaccine production on the continent. Doing so may help African countries to fight the COVID-19 pandemic with additional vaccine supplies, once this capacity comes online, but it could also prepare capacity for other future and ongoing health challenges beyond COVID-19. In fact, progress is already underway: The Institut Pasteur in Dakar, Senegal, with support from a number of donors, is constructing a facility that aims to produce 25 million doses monthly by the end of 2022.
The collective impact on African economies
The effects of trade spillovers, disrupted vaccine supplies, and the emergence of a new highly transmissible variant have been incorporated into an updated version of the UNECA macroeconomic model to assess the impact of the Indian second wave on the aggregate African economy. The situation is rapidly developing, and such estimates are best considered initial approximations among considerable uncertainty.
Initial UNECA estimates show that the outbreak of the delta COVID-19 variant in India is forecast to reduce Africa’s GDP growth by 0.5 percentage points in 2021 and a further 0.1 percent in 2022. These drops amount to approximately $13.5 billion in lost economic output in 2021 alone. Delayed recovery in labor markets and external demand due to the surging COVID-19 cases (with resulting persistent lockdowns) are the key drivers that will drag down economic activity. The pandemic outbreak will also reduce labor supply and labor participation rates as governments tighten restrictions. Rising unemployment, declining incomes, and growing poverty induced by the new wave further necessitate accelerated vaccination to reduce the impact of the Indian wave on the African continent.
New courses out of crisis?
As the “vaccine factory of the world,” India’s need to refocus vaccines toward its own COVID-19 crisis has greatly exacerbated the challenges of vaccine access in Africa. In the words of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, director-general of the World Trade Organization, “We have now seen that over-centralization of vaccine production capacity is incompatible with equitable access in a crisis situation” and that “regional production hubs, in tandem with open supply chains, offer a more promising path to preparedness for future health crisis.”
This is exactly the course of action African governments must see through to improve vaccination rates across the continent and bring forward an end to the crisis. The Indian second COVID-19 wave has reaffirmed the agreement of the African Union Heads of State at the Africa CDC’s vaccine-manufacturing summit on the need for “establishing a sustainable vaccine development and manufacturing ecosystem in Africa.”
Decoupling economic growth from emissions in the Middle East and North Africa
Economic growth plays a critical role in raising living standards and enabling human progress. However, economic growth needs to decouple from negative environmental consequences, as these, in turn, degrade the very foundations of human development. One example of a negative environmental consequence is airborne emissions that lead to climate change and air pollution. To meet any emissions reduction target, the minimum requirement is that economic growth decouples from emissions growth. Hence, at best, emissions would be reduced from year to year, at a steady pace, even if the economy grows—a process called absolute decoupling. At second-best, the growth rate of the economy would outpace the growth rate of emissions—a process called relative decoupling.
No decoupling of emissions from economic growth in MENA
The Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA) is the only region in the world where greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are not decoupling from income growth. The decoupling processes can be visualized as is done in Figure 1 for a world average as well as for Europe and Central Asia (ECA) and MENA. It plots the growth of gross national income (GNI, blue line) and carbon emissions (red line), both in per capita terms, from 1990 to 2018 for an average resident of the world, ECA, and MENA. Globally (left panel of Figure 1), relative decoupling was achieved with average incomes rising faster than per capita carbon emissions, even though emissions were still increasing over this period. In ECA (middle panel of Figure 1), absolute decoupling was achieved, with average carbon emissions per capita decreasing by around 30 percent compared to their 1990 levels. In a forthcoming report,“Blue Skies, Blue Seas in the Middle East and North Africa,” we show that North America also achieved absolute decoupling, while other regions of the world (including East Asia and Pacific, South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean) managed to decouple income growth from carbon emissions relatively. In stark contrast, MENA (right panel of Figure 1) is the only region, in which growth of CO2 emissions per capita has outpaced the growth of average incomes, making it the only region that hasn’t decoupled in some form.
Figure 1. MENA, unlike other regions, is not decoupling income growth from carbon emissions
Source: World Bank staff based on data from United Nations Development Program and Global Carbon Project.Note: Figure shows growth rates of gross national income per capita and carbon emissions per capita in percentage points since 1990.
MENA is an assortment of heterogenous countries: Some actually did manage to decouple, while most others did not. When zooming in on the individual country level, it becomes clear that while MENA as a region was not able to decouple income growth from carbon emissions growth, some countries in the region were. Figure 2 shows that while Iran, Oman, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia were not decoupling, other countries such as Tunisia, Lebanon, and Djibouti have achieved relative decoupling. Bahrain and Jordan were even absolutely decoupling (although only slightly).
Figure 2. Some MENA countries have managed to decouple carbon emissions from income growth
Source: World Bank staff based on data from United Nations Development Program and Global Carbon Project.
Air pollution emissions are decoupling in MENA from economic growth, although this is the world region where this decoupling is taking place at the slowest rate in international comparison (see Figure 3). The pattern is similar for air pollutants such as nitrogen oxide (NOx), which stems from road transport and industries but also agriculture, and sulfur dioxide (SO2), which stems mainly from burning fossil fuels by vehicles but also from energy production. Figure 3 plots differential growth rates for incomes and the respective air pollutant and while MENA has been able to relatively decouple NOx and SO2 emissions from income growth, it was the slowest region doing so. There has been an acceleration of this decoupling trend in recent years due to advances in industrial and agricultural processes; for example in Iran, NOx emissions from the agricultural sector have been reduced strongly by less intensive use of fertilizers, while the switch toward gas for energy production away from heavy oils and desulfurization of flue gas has helped reduce SO2 emissions. In Egypt, industrial NOx emissions decreased beginning in 2010, partly due to advances such as the switch from burning heavy fuel oil (so-called mazout) to using compressed natural gas in brick factories, and due to incentivization of resource efficiency and end-of-pipe technologies. Morocco has also seen positive developments regarding its SO2 emissions, which is attributable to the enforcement of strict sulfur limits in gasoline and diesel in the past years. Nonetheless, slow overall decoupling of these air pollutants puts MENA again at the back in a regional comparison.
Figure 3. MENA region is slowest in decoupling NOx and SO2 emissions
Source: World Bank staff based on data from United Nations Development Program, Hoesly et al. (2018) and World Resources Institute.Note: Figures show differential between growth rates of gross national income per capita and the emission of the respective air pollutant per capita. Growth rates are calculated in comparison to 1990 levels and the differences in growth rates were computed (and expressed in percentage points).
This blog showed that MENA was the only region to not decouple income growth and carbon emissions growth and the least successful in decoupling income growth from air pollutant growth. But what are the reasons for these failures and what can be done about it? Stay tuned for a follow-up blog in which we will discuss why there has not been decoupling in MENA and how to kick-start decoupling, and review some of the main messages coming out of the regional flagship report “Blue Skies, Blue Seas in the Middle East and North Africa.”
Who’s ready to change? Tracking adaptations during scaling in education
For the past seven years, the Center for Universal Education (CUE) has researched education initiatives that are scaling around the world and has found that they share at least one thing in common: Each has proactively and reactively adapted to changing circumstances and contexts. Whether expanding to new communities, becoming embedded into national systems, or responding to the global pandemic, each of these initiatives has needed to alter, tweak, or in some cases overhaul an initiative’s design, delivery, or financing approach.
So, the question is not will our environments change, but how do we adapt. When it comes to education, we’ve found that too often adaptations made are not systematically planned for or well documented, and the opportunity to learn from these modifications is lost. This occurs for many understandable reasons, including that those involved with designing and delivering large-scale education programs often do not have the luxury of space and time to pause, reflect, and course-correct based on new data and changes in the broader environment.
Adaptation tracking tool
In an effort to respond to this reality, CUE has just published an Adaptation Tracker designed to support education practitioners to regularly plan for, document, and learn from adaptations in order to strengthen efforts to scale and sustain an initiative.
The tool is based on the Plan-Do-Study-Act template used in improvement science and directly informed by the experiences of—and input from—Real-time Scaling Lab partners. The tool is intended to be used at various intervals throughout any scaling process, with timely data collected and analyzed to inform quick learning and decisionmaking. It involves four simple steps repeated over time:
Identify what is the overarching scaling goal of the initiative and what key scaling driver or factor contributing to this goal will be the focus of any change.
Plan what adaptation will be tested to respond to a challenge or opportunity related to this scaling driver and how it will be executed and measured.
Test the adaptation in a short learning cycle—capturing any problems that arise, spontaneous changes made, and early results.
Reflect on the results of the adaptation, including what worked, did not work, and any lessons learned. Based on this learning, determine what changes to make to the model or strategy and what further adaptations to try—continuing the iterative learning cycle.
What does this look like in practice?
In the Philippines, the Department of Education (DepEd) has prioritized the effective delivery of teacher professional development (TPD) programs in an effort to improve the quality of education across the country. One flagship program is a blended teacher professional development course—Early Language, Literacy, and Numeracy (ELLN) Digital—rolled out to all K-3 teachers in the country beginning 2019. The ELLN Digital course combines guided independent study of multimedia courseware by the teachers with collaborative learning through school-based teachers’ groups. Given the magnitude of the TPD needs within the system, DepEd faced a major challenge in delivering in-service training to approximately 300,000 K-3 teachers—how to maintain the quality of training as ELLN Digital goes to scale while ensuring the approach is well tailored to the country’s diverse contexts.
In response to this challenge, DepEd partnered with the NGO Foundation for Information Technology Education and Development, Inc. (FIT-ED) to incorporate “Plan-Do-Study-Act” improvement cycles in each school and division. These improvement cycles enable quick feedback loops to inform ongoing adaptation and course correction of ELLN Digital implementation at the school level, and data is planned to be aggregated across schools, divisions, and regions to inform future rollout to more teachers and in more schools. This systemwide iterative learning process has been possible given the space, mandate, and resourcing by the government at the central level.
Over the past three years, a number of lessons are emerging from embedding an iterative adaptive learning cycle into the rollout of a national TPD program. These include:
The need to understand readiness for scaling prior to rolling out any new initiative.
The critical importance of the enabling environment, including the political, cultural, economic, technological, and institutional conditions of the local context.
The centrality of fostering agency among implementers—in this case teachers, school leaders, and coaches—by capacitating them for problem-solving and decisionmaking, and by creating spaces for experimentation and collaboration.
The challenge of building a critical mass of expertise at local levels through—among others—professional learning communities for teachers and instructional leaders collaborating with community members and other education stakeholders.
With so many unknowns in the world, one thing is certain: Our environments are dynamic and constantly evolving. Sustainable scaling must take these realities into account and be prepared to respond and adapt. This requires fostering and strengthening adaptive capacity and the use of data for learning among different stakeholders involved with scaling. This tool, and a suite of other complementary scaling resources, are intended to support these important efforts.
We welcome any thoughts, suggestions, or questions related to this tool. To share your experience or offer feedback for future editions, please email cue@brookings.edu.
Note: This work was carried out with the aid of a grant from the International Development Research Centre, Canada to the Foundation for Information Technology Education and Development (FIT-ED). The views expressed in this work are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the International Development Research Centre, Canada or its Board of Governors; or the Foundation for Information Technology Education and Development.
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Building better cities for children: Coordinating within and across city agencies to harness the power of playful learning
Today, more than half of the world’s children are growing up in cities. By 2030, up to 60 percent of the world’s urban population will be under 18-years old. Yet, children are often invisible to urban planners, developers, and architects when creating city-wide policies that impact transportation, air and noise pollution, and health and well-being, as noted by Tim Gill in his recent book “Urban Playground.” “The truth is that the vast majority of urban planning decisions and projects take no account of their potential impact on children and make no effort to seek children’s views. … All too often, this is down to a simple lack of respect for children’s rights or abilities,” he writes.
What does child-friendly urban planning look like? A growing number of cities are prioritizing early childhood by infusing play and playful learning—child-directed activities that often include learning goals initiated or designed by an adult—into programs and installations to promote healthy development and learning.
In our Brookings report on the steps cities can take to scale playful learning, we called out the need for coordination within and across city agencies to support the design and integration of playful learning efforts into new and existing projects. This was the topic of discussion in our recent Playful Learning Landscapes (PLL) City Network meeting with teams from Chicago, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Tel Aviv.
These were the key takeaways from the city presentations and discussion.
1. Building capacity within the system is critical, especially when cross-sector coordination is required.
A key step in prioritizing early childhood development in Tel Aviv was creating a position in the municipality to work with city officials across administrations to implement reforms including creating citywide parenting services, adapting public spaces for the needs of young children, and improving urban mobility so families with young children could access the services they needed. While the Education Administration or Social Services and Public Health Administration were the logical choices for the home of the new project manager position, the mayor of Tel Aviv placed the position in the Community, Culture, and Sports Administration—a group that collaborated with other administrations to address a wide range of issues that impact the lives of young children and their families. “Many foundations will fund an NGO that works with the city from the outside,” shared one of the Tel Aviv team members. “In my experience, it’s not enough to have resources and work from the outside. You need to build capacity from the inside.”
Children play in one of the sandboxes on the streets of Tel Aviv. (Photo credit: Bosmat Sfadia Wolf)
2. It is valuable to create champions on the ground, as well as at every level in the system, for sustainability of the program.
Leveraging its strengths and hosting collaborative professional development sessions in partnership with Playful Learning Landscapes Action Network (PLLAN) and Free Library, the Office of Parks and Recreation in Philadelphia helped create champions for playful learning and literacy at the ground level. The goal was to turn the recreational leaders into role models for others in the system. “To make things stick in a big system, you have to really find your ‘champions’ on the ground,” shared one of the city network members—“the people who are going to stay and work with children and put them in a position of strength.” At the city agency level, Parks and Recreation and Free Library came together to turn PlayStreets (which was traditionally a meal distribution program) into a playful learning opportunity by leveraging the playful learning elements that already existed in their own work. Identifying champions, especially when resources are limited, goes a long way in helping to pinpoint synergies and implement programs.
Philadelphia families engage in playful learning activities on PlayStreets. (Photo credit: Philadelphia Parks and Recreation)
3. Finding an entry point through existing initiatives or structures can help build important connections, especially in the early stages of aligning across municipalities.
In the early stages of Tel Aviv’s journey to becoming a leading city for young children and families, the mayor asked an innovation team from Bloomberg Philanthropies to pinpoint solutions for alleviating the city’s high cost of living. A citywide survey identified early childhood services—particularly for children ages 3 years and under—as one of the top contributors to the high cost of living. This created an opportunity for Urban95—an initiative of the Bernard van Leer Foundation that asks, “If you could experience a city from 95 centimeters (the height of a three-year-old) what would you change?”—to launch a broader discussion on early childhood. “We [Urban95] were aligning with the municipality’s agenda of [reducing the] cost of living,” shared one of the Tel Aviv team members. “The goal was to change the way the municipality worked and improve the way children play, learn, and move throughout the city.”
4. Alignment and coordination across city agencies doesn’t happen overnight and is a continuous process.
Philadelphia’s Office of Children and Families (OCF) was established in early 2020 to bring city departments including Parks and Recreation and Free Library under one umbrella to ensure that city policies and services for children and families are coordinated in partnership with the school district of Philadelphia. While city departments had playful learning projects that aligned with their department’s missions before OCF was created, the new city agency is fostering stronger connections and a broader vision for how to keep families safe and healthy, especially during the pandemic.
Tel Aviv’s journey to becoming a family-friendly city that prioritizes early childhood started in 2016 and is captured in a case study from Princeton University. The study documents the transformation of a city that once showed little interest in its youngest residents to one in which every city agency embraces early childhood as a strategic priority. “I think it’s an ongoing work in progress because people leave their post after you have invested in them,” shared one of the city network members. “How do you constantly build your champions and connect with your champions? This is something that always needs to be on the table for working with municipalities.”
Note: The Center for Universal Education receives funding for its work on Playful Learning Landscapes from the Bernard van Leer Foundation, which also supports Urban95. The views expressed in this blog are solely those of the authors.
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The brutal truth about Bitcoin
Bitcoin, the original cryptocurrency, has been on a wild ride since its creation in 2009. Earlier this year, the price of one Bitcoin surged to over $60,000, an eightfold increase in 12 months. Then it fell to half that value in just a few weeks. Values of other cryptocurrencies such as Dogecoin have risen and fallen even more sharply, often based just on Elon Musk’s tweets. Even after the recent fall in their prices, the total market value of all cryptocurrencies now exceeds $1.5 trillion, a staggering amount for virtual objects that are nothing more than computer code.
Are cryptocurrencies the wave of the future and should you be using and investing in them? And do the massive swings in their prices—nearly $1 trillion was wiped off their total value in May—portend trouble for the financial system?
Bitcoin was created (by a person or group that remains unidentified to this day) as a way to conduct transactions without the intervention of a trusted third party, such as a central bank or financial institution. Its emergence amid the global financial crisis, which shook trust in banks and even governments, was perfectly timed. Bitcoin enabled transactions using only digital identities, granting users some degree of anonymity. This made Bitcoin the preferred currency for illicit activities, including recent ransomware attacks. It powered the shadowy darknet of illegal online commerce much like PayPal helped the rise of eBay by making payments easier.
While Bitcoin’s roller-coaster prices garner attention, of far more consequence is the revolution in money and finance it has set off that will ultimately affect every one of us, for better and worse.
As it grew in popularity, Bitcoin became cumbersome, slow, and expensive to use. It takes about 10 minutes to validate most transactions using the cryptocurrency and the transaction fee has been at a median of about $20 this year. Bitcoin’s unstable value has also made it an unviable medium of exchange. It is as though your $10 bill could buy you a beer on one day and a bottle of fine wine on another.
Moreover, it has become clear that Bitcoin does not offer true anonymity. The government’s success in tracking and retrieving part of the Bitcoin ransom paid to the hacking collective DarkSide in the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack has heightened doubts about the security and nontraceability of Bitcoin transactions.
While Bitcoin has failed in its stated objectives, it has become a speculative investment. This is puzzling. It has no intrinsic value and is not backed by anything. Bitcoin devotees will tell you that, like gold, its value comes from its scarcity—Bitcoin’s computer algorithm mandates a fixed cap of 21 million digital coins (nearly 19 million have been created so far). But scarcity by itself can hardly be a source of value. Bitcoin investors seem to be relying on the greater fool theory—all you need to profit from an investment is to find someone willing to buy the asset at an even higher price.
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Despite their high valuations on paper, a collapse of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is unlikely to rattle the financial system. Banks have mostly stayed on the sidelines. As with any speculative bubble, naive investors who come to the party late are at greatest risk of losses. The government should certainly caution retail investors that, much like in the GameStop saga, they act at their own peril. Securities that enable speculation on Bitcoin prices are already regulated, but there is not much more the government can or ought to do.
Bitcoin is not innocuous. Transactions are processed by “miners” using massive amounts of computing power in return for rewards in the form of Bitcoin. By some estimates, the Bitcoin network consumes as much energy as entire countries like Argentina and Norway, not to mention the mountains of electronic waste from specialized machines used for such mining operations that burn out rapidly.
Whatever Bitcoin’s eventual fate, its blockchain technology is truly ingenious and groundbreaking. Bitcoin has shown how programs running on networks of computers can be harnessed to securely conduct payments, within and between countries, without relying on avaricious financial institutions that charge high fees. For migrant workers sending remittances back to their home countries, for instance, such fees are a major burden. Technologies that make payments cheaper, quicker and easier to track would benefit consumers and businesses, facilitating both domestic and international commerce.
The technology is not without risks. Facebook plans to issue its own cryptocurrency called Diem intended to make digital payments easier. Unlike Bitcoin, Diem would be fully backed by reserves of U.S. dollars or other major currencies, ensuring stable value. But, as with its other ostensibly high-minded initiatives, Facebook can hardly be trusted to put the public’s welfare above its own. The prospect of multinational corporations one day issuing their own unbacked cryptocurrencies worldwide is deeply disquieting. Such currencies won’t threaten the U.S. dollar, but could wipe out the currencies of smaller and less developed countries.
Variants of Bitcoin’s technology are also making many financial products and services available to the masses at low cost, directly connecting savers and borrowers. These developments and the possibilities created by the new technologies have spurred central banks to consider issuing digital versions of their own currencies. China, Japan, and Sweden are already conducting trials of their digital currencies.
Ironically, rather than truly democratizing finance, some of these innovations may exacerbate inequality. Unequal financial literacy and digital access might result in sophisticated investors garnering the benefits while the less well off, dazzled by new technologies, take on risks they do not fully comprehend. Computer algorithms could worsen entrenched racial and other biases in credit scoring and financial decisions, rather than reducing them. The ubiquity of digital payments could also destroy any remaining vestiges of privacy in our day-to-day lives.
While Bitcoin’s roller-coaster prices garner attention, of far more consequence is the revolution in money and finance it has set off that will ultimately affect every one of us, for better and worse.
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