The Sustainable Development Goals recently adopted by the United Nations represent an important step to identify shared global goals for development over the next two decades. Yet, the stated goals are not as straightforward and easy to interpret as they appear on the surface. Review of the...

This paper explores the investments needed to achieve universal access to electricity in Sub-Saharan Africa by 2030, and the additional operation and maintenance costs these investments entail. It also explores the drivers of these costs, by exploring hundreds of scenarios that combine...

This paper provides an overview of research on out-of-pocket health expenditures, reviewing the various summary measures and the results of multi-country studies using these measures. The paper presents estimates for 146 countries from all World Bank income groups for all summary measures, along...

The Atlas of Sustainable Development Goals 2018 is a visual guide to the trends, challenges and measurement issues related to each of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. The Atlas features maps and data visualizations, primarily drawn from World Development Indicators (WDI) - the World Bank's...

Paul Wolfowitz, President of the World Bank, remarked that the millennium development goals (MDGs) created a metric of accountability for which humanity will hold the World Bank answerable. It also created a vital tool for measuring progress. The MDGs call for developing countries to improve...

The government of Uganda has given strong emphasis to eradicating open defecation and to encouraging people to invest in safe containment systems. Funding to local governments is spurring sanitation improvement on a significant scale. But as the pace of urbanization picks up in the country and...

The Global Monitoring Report 2015/2016: Development Goals in an Era of Demographic Change details the progress toward the global development goals and examines the impact of demographic change on achieving these goals. Part I examines global development progress, the unfinished development...

Foreword -- Acknowledgments -- About the data -- Introduction -- The world by income, FY2017 -- The world by region -- Sustainable development goals -- 1. No poverty -- 2. Zero hunger -- 3. Good health and well-being -- 4. Quality education -- 5. Gender equality -- 6. Clean water and sanitation...

The Millennium Development Goal of halving the incidence of extreme poverty from its 1990 level will be achieved in 2015, and the international development community is now moving to a new goal of "ending extreme poverty." However, the data needed to monitor progress remain severely limited....

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the World Bank's corporate goals of ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity call for specific attention to the poor and vulnerable. The overarching objective of the SDGs is to end poverty in all its forms, but their key difference from...