Economics & Development

The development objective of the Improving Healthcare Services in Somalia Project for Somalia is to improve the coverage of essential health and nutrition services in Project areas and strengthen stewardship capacity of Ministries of Health. This paper seeks the approval of the fourth Additional Financing (AF) in the amount of 15 million US dollars for the project. The AF aims to stabilize essential health and nutrition services in high-priority districts affected by drought, displacement, and disease outbreaks by leveraging existing project-supported health facilities and partnerships with UNICEF, NGOs, and nutrition cluster members. It will target approximately 1.98 million people, including about 1.2 million children under five, through the procurement and distribution of critical nutrition, immunization, and emergency health supplies. A new component on Essential Nutrition and Emergency Health Supplies will ensure the uninterrupted availability of these commodities, supporting the treatment and prevention of severe acute malnutrition through therapeutic foods and supplements, strengthening immunization coverage by supplying key vaccines and delivery materials, and enhancing emergency response capacity through the pre-positioning of outbreak response kits, including cholera supplies. Implementation will build on existing project arrangements, with UNICEF managing supply logistics and monitoring systems, while NGOs deliver treatment and services, ensuring coordinated, timely, and effective response aligned with broader humanitarian efforts and national health systems.

This report presents a spatial analysis of coal mining lands in four Southeast Asian countries—Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Viet Nam—to identify areas that may be suitable for repurposing to large-scale solar photovoltaic (PV), onshore wind, and/or pumped hydroelectric energy storage (PHES). Using global datasets of coal mining lands, spatial data layers of exclusion factors relevant to renewable energy siting, such as solar and wind energy potential, minimum mine site area, distance to transmission infrastructure, and overlap with protected areas, were overlaid to help identify potentially suitable mining areas for repurposing. This was complemented by a quantitative analysis by interviewing regional policy experts to identify country-specific legislative barriers to renewable energy repurposing of mining lands.