The new Africa Strategy “Africa’s Future and the World Bank Support to It” underpins country and sector strategies for the Bank’s engagement in the Region. The Strategy aims at enhancing competitiveness and employment, reducing vulnerability and building resilience, and improving governance and public sector capacity on the continent. AFTHD, which covers three sectors: Health, Nutrition and Population (HNP), Education, and Social Protection,
Developing country governments allocate roughly a third of their budgets to education and health, and donor allocations to health in particular have reached historic highs. Weaknesses in quality in large part explain why the increased spending and expanded access to education and health services have not been matched with commensurate improvements in human development outcomes. This is also evidenced in the uneven progress toward the MDGs in, especially in the human capital-related MDGs.
In the education and health sectors quality is critically dependent on what service providers know and what they do. But, there is little robust and representative data of what teachers and health workers do during a typical work-day, their levels of knowledge and skill. Inspired by the Bank's 2004 WDR Making Services Work for Poor People, the Service Delivery Indicators (SDI) is the first attempt to standardize human development service delivery indicators across Africa that focus on provider effort and competence, in addition to the usual focus on inputs.
The vision of the Service Delivery Indicators (SDI) project is that within 5 years across Africa in about 15–20 countries, Service Delivery Indicators would be a highly trusted data source, anticipated by policymakers, NGOs and the media every 2–3 years to feed into (i) high level policy discussions on effectiveness of public spending; (ii) old and new media so that citizen groups and NGOs could engage governments to improve accountability for service delivery; and (iii) at the global level, result in a highly visible annual scorecard on Service Delivery in Africa.
The Service Delivery Indicators project is a unique partnership of the World Bank, the African Economic Research Consortium and the African Development Bank is expected to become an important tool for accountability for performance—both for governments to monitor results, as well as enabling citizens to challenge poor governance.
The World Bank is the implementing agency for the first five years of the project, and it is within this context that the capacity of the SDI Team—located in the Africa Human Development Department (AFTHD)—is being expanded. The economist would be expected to work closely with the AFTHD Director and the SDI Program Leader, in particular.
The candidate would be expected to be based in Nairobi and to undertake extensive travel on a regular basis.
Economist (Human Development)
Economist (Human Development)
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