Netherlands for the World Bank

Your guide to the World Bank Group

Netherlands for the World Bank

ProACT: Using data to strengthen the efficiency and integrity of public procurement

In 2018, governments around the world spent around $11 trillion—around 12 percent of global GDP— on public procurement.  At these substantial volumes, any improvement in public procurement can potentially contribute to savings, integrity, economic growth, inclusiveness, and sustainability. As governments around the world face massive fiscal pressure and rising inflation, they must ensure productive use of public resources—an efficient, transparent, and accountable public procurement is one way of doing so.

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Raising the bar on debt data transparency

Total public debt stands at an alarming 50-year high in low- and middle-income economies,jun2022_debttransparency_datablog_mainimage the equivalent of more than 200 percent of government revenues. With the pandemic-induced economic slowdown, the impact of the war in Ukraine, and the rise of interest rates, many countries are facing severe challenges in servicing their debt. 

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Djibouti’s Data Collection Efforts: How Information Helps Tackle Poverty

Four years ago, the Government of Djibouti launched Vision 2035, a target to improve Djibouti-farmersliving standards for the country’s people over the next two decades. A country in the Horn of Africa, Djibouti has a rocky, arid landscape that has driven the vast majority of people to cities. More than 35 percent of the country lives in poverty, and about 21 percent in extreme poverty, including nomadic Djiboutians and others who live in extreme rural poverty.

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Global Gas Flaring Jumps to Levels Last Seen in 2009

WASHINGTON, July 21, 2020 — Estimates from satellite data show global gas flaring gasincreased to levels not seen in more than a decade, to 150 billion cubic meters (bcm), equivalent to the total annual gas consumption of Sub-Saharan Africa.

The 3% rise, from 145 billion cubic meters (bcm) in 2018 to 150 bcm in 2019, was mainly due to increases in three countries: the United States (up by 23%), Venezuela (up by 16%), and Russia (up by 9%). Gas flaring in fragile or conflict-affected countries increased from 2018 to 2019: in Syria by 35% and in Venezuela by 16%, despite oil production flattening in Syria and declining by 40% in Venezuela.

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World Bank data infrastructure: shortening the path from data to insights

Data is not valuable in a vacuum. Data is only valuable once information, insight or in data_infrastructure_visualother words knowledge is extracted from it and is used to make decisions, shape policies, and change behaviors.

Data scientists, analysts, and researchers spend a significant amount of time and effort extracting knowledge from data and communicating it. Because extracting knowledge from data can be expensive, it is important to find ways to reduce its cost. A robust and well-designed data infrastructure can contribute to this cost reduction by smoothing the frictions involved with data analytics projects: storing, searching, accessing, understanding, cleaning, transforming, analyzing, and visualizing data. Lowering that cost can go a long way toward increasing data use and knowledge production.

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Is education ready to work in data-intensive environments?

What do initiatives such as personalized and adaptive learning, chatbots for education, untitled.pngautomatic translators or the use of predictive learning analytics have in common? All of them are components of a ‘data-driven education’.

In many countries, there is a clear interest in expanding the role of digital technologies in education, which inevitably is leading towards more data-intensive educational systems. With the growing interest for adaptive intelligent tutoring systems offering natural language interactiontools for predicting school dropout or new automated systems to boost student recruitment, it is likely that the importance of data-intensive technologies for education will increase in the years to come.

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eC2: Scoping and Design of Integrated Data Platform.

Deadline: 10-Aug-2019 at 11:59:59 PM (Eastern Time – Washington D.C.) Data-for-Development_cover-image_web

The World Bank (WB) is supporting the Government of Indonesia to develop a programmatic response to the challenges of sustainable urbanization. City Planning Labs (CPL) is one such Bank Executed Technical Assistance initiative that aims to support municipal governments to build capacity for a data-driven approach to city planning, enabling the development of smart, inclusive, and sustainable cities. Given the success of the interventions in two Indonesian cities namely Kota Semarang and Kota Denpasar, CPL has received multi-year support from the Indonesia Sustainable Urbanization (IDSUN) Multi-Donor Trust Fund (MDTF) to scale-up the initiative.

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Harnessing the power of data so no child is left behind

Data plays a crucial role in the 2030 agenda set out by the Sustainable Development grid_titleGoals (SDGs). It helps us to focus policies and make better decisions. It is needed to set targets, measure progress towards those targets and to hold governments accountable to their commitments under the SDGs.

Data is also essential for governments to fulfill their pledge to leave no one behind in the SDGs; that the goals should be met for all segments of society and that those furthest behind should be reached first. Despite significant progress over the last few years, we are still far away from being able to systematically identify those at risk of being left behind or to monitor their progress towards the 2030 commitments.

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Financial innovation and additionality: The power of economic analysis and data analytics

As public and private financial institutions innovate and expand the range of financFinancial Educationial products that households and firms use, questions about how these services are affecting consumers, providers, and the economy as a whole have become central. A new policy brief by Abraham, Schmukler, and Tessada explores how evaluating the “additionality” of financial services can help answer such questions.

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