Evans School Policy Analysis & Research Group (EPAR)

Household survey data are a key source of information for policy-makers at all levels. In developing countries, household data are commonly used to target interventions and evaluate progress towards development goals. The World Bank’s Living Standards Measurement Study - Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) are a particularly rich source of nationally-representative panel data for six Sub-Saharan African countries: Ethiopia, Malawi, Niger, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda. To help understand how these data are used, EPAR reviewed the existing literature referencing the LSMS-ISA and identified 415 publications, working papers, reports, and presentations with primary research based on LSMS-ISA data. We find that use of the LSMS-ISA has been increasing each year since the first survey waves were made available in 2009, with several universities, multilateral organizations, government offices, and research groups across the globe using the data to answer questions on agricultural productivity, farm management, poverty and welfare, nutrition, and several other topics.

Our initial agriculture capacity building search revealed best practices including institutional partnership building, cross-border opportunities such as ‘twinning,’ and views that these practices are most effective when accompanied by appropriate policies and regulatory frameworks to incentivize return on education to home countries. In addition, the literature explained the historical and political context  in which some countries successfully built higher educational capacity, suggesting a set of socio-political conditions necessary for a ‘surge’ in capacity building to occur.  Our results raised questions about challenges shaping these best practices (e.g. “brain drain” leading to the need for cross-border opportunities) as well as possible approaches to address these underlying issues. To further examine identified challenges from our initial findings, we re-oriented our search to investigate retention strategies, regional or intra-national network capacity building approaches, and whether there is in fact a need for higher education capacity in all countries through comparative advantage or otherwise. This report presents a review of the literature on the best and worst practices for national agricultural capacity building when investing in a country's higher education system or when investing directly in national or relevant global research capacity. We find that several countries have successfully employed a variety of retention, return, and diaspora strategies to build capacity by capitalizing on the feedback loops of international mobility.  In addition, several countries in Africa have employed strategies to address the rural-to-urban “brain drain” by prioritizing education of students with post-secondary rural agricultural work experience and strong ties to rural communities in order to return the benefit of this education to local communities. The report discusses these and other strategies as well as analysis related to the ‘whole system effect’ of higher education and subsequent ‘need’ for Higher Agricultural Education (HAE) capacity in all countries.

This brief analyzes the indicators used by the World Bank in its Project Appraisal Documents (PAD) to measure the outputs and outcomes of 44 Water, Sanitation and Hygiene projects in Africa and Asia from 2000-2010.  This report details the methods used to collect and organize the indicators, and provides a brief analysis of the type of indicators used and their evolution over time. A searchable spreadsheet of the indicators used in this analysis accompanies this summary. We find that some patterns emerge over time, though none are very drastic. The most common group of indicators used by the World Bank are “management” oriented indicators (28% of indicators). Management indicators are disproportionately used in African projects as compared to projects in Asia. Several projects in Africa incorporate indicators relating to legal/regulatory/policy outcomes, while projects in Asia do not. In recent years, the World Bank has used fewer indicators that measure service delivery, health, and education and awareness.

Water supply and sanitation is the responsibility of sub-national state governments under the Indian Constitution. At present, the national government sets water supply and sanitation policy while states plan, design, and execute water supply schemes accordingly. Furthermore, while state governments are in charge of operation and maintenance, they may pass the responsibility to village or district levels. Given the highly decentralized provision of water and sanitation services, there is no autonomous regulatory agency for the water supply and sanitation sector in India at the state or national level. This report reviews literature on India’s urban sanitation policy. The methodology includes Google, Lexis-Nexis, and University of Washington Library searches, searches of two major Indian newspapers, and searches of websites and blogs sponsored by non-governmental organizations. Sources also include the India Sanitation Portal, a forum on sanitation in India used by governmental and nongovernmental organizations, and WASH Sanitation Updates, a sanitation news feed with considerable material on India. We find that urban sanitation policy, as embodied in the National Urban Sanitation Plan of 2008, remains focused on decentralized approaches. Our research reveals no evidence of a change in official policy, nor evidence suggesting that government sanitation programs conflict with official policy.