Tag Archives: UN

WBG app: Spatial Agent

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A new, free World Bank app offers one-stop access to interactive maps and charts Mapof national, regional, and global data sets.

Solutions to many of the development challenges faced across the globe are hampered by the poor availability of spatial data. How can you easily find out which areas in Madagascar are susceptible to cyclones? Or how about which areas in India have high child malnutrition? Or what the major exports of Vietnam are? Or how fast the population in Lagos is rising?

The World Bank, in its quest to improve data transparency and open data platforms, has developed an easily accessible way to get answers—a Spatial Agent application that visualizes available spatial and temporal development-related data on an interactive mobile platform. It pulls together thousands of types of data from more than 300 web services from major institutions—United Nations Organizations, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), European Space Agency (ESA), World Bank, universities, and many more.

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Disaster risk management a top priority on the international stage this week

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How many school children can be endangered by the schools themselves? The answer was over 600,000 in metropolitan Lima alone.

In the region, fraught with frequent seismic activity, nearly two-thirds of schools were highly vulnerable to damage by earthquakes. Working with the Peruvian Ministry of Education (MINEDU), the World Bank and the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) conducted a risk assessment that ultimately helped make an estimated 2.5 million children safer and paved the way for a $3.1 billion national risk-reduction strategy.

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World Water Day: Take Action around the World to Tackle a Water Crisis

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Today we celebrate World Water Day around the world.WWD17-feature

  • In Marseille, young people are coming together to promote innovative projects by entrepreneurs for recycling water in households, agriculture, industry and the environment, and to focus attention on the shared responsibility to build water security for the future of the Mediterranean Region.
  • In Durban, the UN is launching the 2017 World Water Development Report (WWDR) titled “Wastewater: The Untapped Resource” and the High Level Panel on Water is unveiling the initiative on “Access to water and sanitation for 10 billion people” to accelerate the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
  • In Rome, an unprecedented conversation is happening at the Vatican to shift how the world values and understands its single most precious resource: water.
  • In Indonesia, national television is focusing on good practices in fecal sludge management, highlighting the link between poor sanitation and stunting, and discussing how to meet the country’s target of universal access to water and sanitation by 2019.

World Water Day is about taking action around the world to tackle a water crisis.

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Charting a path to valuing the world’s most precious resource

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Article published on http://www.worldbank.org.

Most people agree that water is an extremely valuable resource—for farmers who depend on it to grow crops, for factories that need it to cool machines and spin turbines and, of course for life itself. But unlike most other valuable resources, it’s hard to put a price on water. The very fact that water is so important to people, economies, and the environment means that it is tough to even agree on a common way of valuing it.

No less an economic mind than Adam Smith was stumped by this challenge. As he famously observed, “Nothing is more useful than water: but it will purchase scarcely anything. A diamond, on the contrary, has scarcely any use-value; but a very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it.”

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Imagining infrastructure services in 2017

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<!– <!– /sites/all/themes/blogs/templates/header/js/jquery-1.4.4.min.js –>One of my favorite songs when I was growing up was John Lennon’s “Imagine.” A few months ago, UNICEF created a project around it to highlight the plight of millions of refugee children. Now, as the year draws to a close, I couldn’t help but imagine a world with high-quality, affordable, sustainable, well-maintained, infrastructure services for everyone.

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12 moments for water in 2016

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2016 has become the year for water. From the World Economic Forum, COP22, to thewater Budapest Water Summit, water has been widely acknowledged as a key to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, and essential to the climate change solution.

Here are the defining moments of 2016 that put water security and sustainability on the global agenda like never before:

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Global Financing Facility Launched with Billions Already Mobilized to End Maternal and Child Mortality by 2030

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New partnership to raise resources from private capital markets to help close global financing gap for investments in maternal, adolescent and child health.

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia, July 13, 2015—The United Nations, the World Bank Group, and the Governments of Canada, Norway and the United States joined country and global health leaders today to launch the Global Financing Facility (GFF) in support of Every Woman Every Child, and announced that $12 billion in domestic and international, private and public funding has already been aligned to country-led five-year investment plans for women’s, children’s and adolescents’ health in the four GFF front-runner countries of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania.

Launched at the Third International Financing for Development Conference, the GFF is a key financing platform in support of the United Nations Secretary-General’s Global Strategy for Women’s, Children’s and Adolescents’ Health and the Sustainable Development Goals.

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RVO Event

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The event will be held in the Netherlands and has been advertised in Dutch, sorry for the inconvience.

Op 10 juni a.s. vindt er in Den Haag een evenement plaats ter voorbereiding van de World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul, georganiseerd door RVO.nl in samenwerking met de Verenigde Naties (o.a. OCHA) en het Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken. Doel van deze bijeenkomst is Nederlandse private partijen de kans te bieden om (innovatieve) ideeën, initiatieven en lopende activiteiten ten aanzien van rampen en crises te bespreken en mogelijke partners voor samenwerking te vinden.

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