The Water and Sanitation Program (WSP) has provided advice on investments and policies to its partners and clients in developing countries for more than 21 years. Much of its early work, such as that on low-cost technologies, demand-responsiveness, strategic sanitation planning, and participatory hygiene have now become standard approaches in the sector. Drawing from its field network in over 30 countries, the Program is continuing to explore new frontiers of knowledge. For example, it is identifying and testing private sector partnerships that provide services to the poor and helping its partners gain access to current sector practices. The Program has been a forerunner of a growing list of partnership programs managed by the World Bank. Its well-established global network, strong tradition of client responsiveness, and continuous open dialogue with World Bank clients in developing countries provide a model for development practice. The Program is focusing its attention and resources on the most critical countries and regions of its operation. It is building partnerships with a broader range of stakeholders and developing alliances with the leading international agencies and sources of knowledge in the sector. Limiting further overall growth, the Program's management is seeking to reduce fixed costs and increase flexibility to enable the WSP to reduce risk and better respond to opportunities and new client demands.

En este informe de investigaciones, , se examina cómo funcionan los mercados de agua, quién participa, cuál es la naturaleza de las transacciones y qué efectos tienen los mercados en la productividad y el ingreso agrícolas, con objeto de determinar qué fomenta o impide el surgimiento de mercados de agua viables. En el informe se reseña la literatura actual sobre los mercados de agua subterránea, las pruebas empíricas de su funcionamiento y las opciones existentes en materia de política. Se examinan los patrones de establecimiento de pozos entubados y mercados de agua subterránea particulares, con datos de los distritos del país en general y luego se analiza con detalle el funcionamiento de los mercados de agua subterránea con datos de las familias campesinas recogidos en la encuesta realizada por el IFPRI de 1990 a 1992. | EPTD | IFPRI1 | Non-PR | Abstract

De acuerdo con el Índice Global del Hambre (GHI, por sus siglas en inglés) de 2012, el hambre a nivel mundial ha disminuido algo desde 1990 pero continúa siendo “serio”. El promedio global enmascara diferencias dramáticas entre regiones y países. A nivel regional, los mayores puntajes del GHI se encuentran en Asia meridional y en el África Subsahariana. Asia meridional redujo sus puntajes de GHI de forma significativa entre 1990 y 1996 —principalmente a través de una reducción en la proporción de niños con bajo peso— pero no pudo mantener este rápido progreso. Y aunque el África Subsahariana progresó menos que Asia meridional en la década de 1990, ha logrado reducir la brecha a partir del nuevo milenio, con un puntaje del GHI en 2012 apenas por debajo del obtenido por Asia meridional. | Non-PR | IFPRI2; GRP24 | COM; MTID; DGO; EPTD; PHND; WCAO

Book | COM; MTID; DGO; EPTD; PHND; WCAO | De acuerdo con el Índice Global del Hambre (GHI, por sus siglas en inglés) de 2012, el hambre a nivel mundial ha disminuido algo desde 1990 pero continúa siendo “serio”. El promedio global enmascara diferencias dramáticas entre regiones y países. A nivel regional, los mayores puntajes del GHI se encuentran en Asia meridional y en el África Subsahariana. Asia meridional redujo sus puntajes de GHI de forma significativa entre 1990 y 1996 —principalmente a través de una reducción en la proporción de niños con bajo peso— pero no pudo mantener este rápido progreso. Y aunque el África Subsahariana progresó menos que Asia meridional en la década de 1990, ha logrado reducir la brecha a partir del nuevo milenio, con un puntaje del GHI en 2012 apenas por debajo del obtenido por Asia meridional. | IFPRI2; GRP24 | Non-PR

The Sustainable Development Goals have set an agenda for transformational change in water access, aiming for secure household connections globally. Despite this goal, communal groundwater supplies are likely to remain the main source of improved water supplies for many rural areas in Africa and South Asia for decades to come. Understanding the poor functionality of existing communal supplies remains, therefore, a priority. A critical first step is to establish a sector-wide definition of borehole supply functionality and a standard method of its assessment.

The rapid decline of groundwater levels (GWL) due to pervasive groundwater abstraction in the densely populated (~1 billion) Indus-Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna (IGBM) transboundary river basins of South Asia, necessitates a robust framework of prediction and understanding. While few localized studies exist, three-dimensional regional-scale characterization of GWL prediction is yet to be implemented. Here, ‘support vector machine’, a machine-learning-based method, is applied to data from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) and data on land-surface-model-based groundwater storage and meteorological variables, to predict the GWL anomaly (GWLA) in the IGBM. The study has three main objectives, (1) to understand the spatial (observation well locations) and subsurface (shallow vs. deep observation wells) variability in prediction results for in-situ GWLA data for a large number of observation wells (n = 4,791); (2) to determine its relationship with groundwater abstraction, and; (3) to outline the advantages and limitations of using GRACE data for predicting GWLAs. The findings, based on individual observation well results, suggest significant prediction efficiency (median statistics: r > 0.71, NSE > 0.70; p < 0.05) in most of the IGBM; however, the study identifies hotspots, mostly in the agriculture-intensive regions, having relatively poor model performance. Further analysis of the subsurface depth-wise prediction statistics reveals that the significant dominance of pumping in the deeper depths of the aquifer is linked to the relatively poor model performance for the deep observation wells (screen depth > 35 m) compared with the shallow observation wells (screen depth < 35 m), thus, highlighting the limitation of GRACE in representing spatial and depth-dependent local-scale pumping.