Economics & Development

Nourish and Flourish addresses the urgent challenge of sustainably feeding a projected 10 billion people by 2050. Although an additional 2 billion people have been fed in the last 20 years, current agricultural water management (AWM) practices must be transformed if future needs are to be met without environmental damage. The report shows how this challenge can be met through three paradigm shifts: (1) embrace complexity to balance the requirements of people, prosperity, and the planet; (2) establish incentives to transition from hardware to services; and (3) end the guesswork by collecting and using data for transparent, evidence-based decisions. These shifts are complemented by a new water-food nexus framework that categorizes countries by their level of water stress (high/low) and food trade position (net importer/exporter), enabling tailored, context-specific solutions rather than one-size-fits-all approaches. Combined with examples of country experiences, the report illustrates pathways to AWM transformation at scale. Nourish and Flourish addresses the question of how these changes will be financed - because no government can do this alone. It outlines how existing agricultural finance can be better allocated and how sources of financing can be expanded and diversified, including a greater role for private sector participation and investment. It also addresses how innovations can be integrated to improve governance, service performance, financial sustainability, and productivity. The report reframes AWM not only as a means to improve production but also as a platform to deliver economywide gains across sectors. The analysis shows that strategic AWM investments can unlock major development dividends. One action alone - expanding sustainable irrigation - can create at least 245 million jobs, before accounting for the multiplier effect across storage, processing, transport, and markets. By transforming how countries manage agricultural water, policy makers can simultaneously boost food production, create jobs, build climate resilience, cut emissions, and protect ecosystems, nourishing people while enabling economies and landscapes to flourish on a livable planet.

Over March-May 2026, the world faced what was defined as “the biggest energy crisis in history.” How did countries respond to such challenge? To what extent were social protection systems scaled up, and if not so, why? The paper offers three main contributions: it codifies global social protection responses in 2026 and compares them to measures mitigating economic crises in 2008, 2020, and 2022; it helps interpret responses through a novel, stylized crisis response framework, including explaining choices around “if” and “how” to respond; and it sets out four illustrative reform scenarios for making social protection more crisis ready. The paper argues that for crisis scalability to gain more policy traction, it must be communicated and devised as an effort to prepare seriously, scale up temporarily, and scale down credibly.

Ratings of the Uganda Intergovernmental Fiscal Transfers Program for Uganda were as follows: Outcome was satisfactory; Bank performance was satisfactory; M&E quality was substantial. Lessons and recommendations were as follows. First, formula-based allocation reform is politically feasible when led by strong government ownership and backed by credible independent verification; future operations should anchor reforms in the Ministry of Finance to leverage budget authority for coordination and embed independent verification from the outset to depoliticize decisions. Second, disbursement-linked indicator structures should reward incremental progress and be verifiable in practice; teams should stress-test design against institutional capacity before approval, use scalable indicators as the default for multi-level reforms, and simplify verification protocols at entry rather than through later restructuring. Third, using country monitoring and evaluation systems strengthens institutionalization, but data quality must be managed as an explicit risk; programs should include data quality improvement actions in the program action plan, build reporting capacity, and conduct periodic system audits, especially where results trigger disbursements. Fourth, multi-sector programs require explicit mapping of cross-sector dependencies and clear accountability for joint outcomes; preparation should assign procurement oversight responsibility, invest early in local government contract supervision capacity, and include triggers that require evidence of cross-sector functionality, such as water connectivity for social facilities, before counting infrastructure targets as achieved. Fifth, adding new sectors or transitioning services into national systems demands sequenced readiness and service continuity; programs should include phased staffing and deployment plans, interim arrangements to maintain services during recruitment, and a clearly mandated transition coordinator with resources and measurable commitments, particularly in refugee-hosting or post-crisis settings. Sixth, infrastructure gains are not durable without maintenance financing; future operations should link infrastructure results to functionality rather than construction counts, condition part of disbursements on verified adequacy and execution of operations and maintenance budgets, and deploy verification that tests actual spending and functionality on the ground.