When the South Asia Development Marketplace for innovative ideas to tackle stigma and discrimination relating to HIV/AIDS was launched in November 2007 by the HIV/AIDS Group in the South Asia Region of the World Bank and its partners, civil societ...

Governance for All sounds a lot like Education for All.  That's the global movement, led by UNESCO, that aims to meet the learning needs of all children, youth and adults by 2015.  But this time it's the World Bank, and our own Dani Kaufmann, laun...

Contributed by Forhad Shilpi and Uwe Deichmann

Will investments in agricultural technology by themselves be sufficient to ensure long-term productivity growth in the farm sector and, more importantly, for rural poverty reduction?  As rapidly risin...

Only about one-quarter of households living in developing countries have any form of financial savings with formal banking institutions. Even in countries that have experienced substantial development over the last decade or two, this statistic re...

Pakistan’s education indicators are abysmally low, especially when it comes to learning outcomes.  Almost everyone you speak with has strong views on why the situation is what it is, and what should be done about it.  Some advocate spending more m...

First the good news.  The Indian government has agreed to sell the originally-agreed 400,000 tons of non-basmati rice to the Government of Bangladesh at a price of $430 per ton. On March 30th, the Government of Bangladesh’s Purchase Committee appr...

My blog post on social audits as change agents has attracted more engagement than I would have expected. Some of it has been through conversation but a substantive part has also been in writing.  Keshav Desiraju, a senior IAS officer writes:

You ...

In late February of every year, I get ready to be disappointed by the budget speech of the Indian Finance Minister.   The reason is that, despite ample evidence that there are serious problems with the productivity of public spending in health, ed...

While international development practitioners debate and discuss the best tool for people’s monitoring, the Indian government takes a page out of the book of the Right to Livelihood and Right to Food movements and of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sanga...

Rising--and even accelerating--world food prices are causing serious problems to South Asia’s net food importers such as Bangladesh.  To make matters worse, the country lost about 2 million metric tons...