Development Impact Group

As low- and middle-income countries rapidly urbanize, there are significant opportunities to improve environmental efficiency, labor productivity, and welfare. The greatest gains will be achieved in places where the transport system enables the city to capitalize on agglomeration benefits. Making a direct assessment of the contribution of urban mobility to these impacts is a challenging prospect, yet crucial for World Bank operations. ieConnect focuses research on a few key cities, using them as laboratories to better understand the transport systems by investing in different types of innovative data, combining these with traditional survey data, and conducting experiments that can shed light on critical questions such as transport pricing or impacts for workers. Innovative data used in the urban mobility sector are drawn from Call Detail Record (CDR) data, smartcard data, social media, traffic videos, and crowdsourcing. In addition to producing policy-relevant research for cities, the team also generates technical packages and tools that can be applied by practitioners or researchers in other cities.

Improved access to roads can increase output, reduce costs, and foster economic growth. It comes as no surprise that the biggest multilateral development banks (MDBs), including Asian Development Bank, European Investment Bank, and Inter-American Development Bank, pledged a total of $175 billion to fund sustainable transport systems by 20301. The World Bank Group invested up to 48 billion USD in the transport sector in 2019, as a part of private sector participation in infrastructure2. Given the magnitude and pervasiveness of transport investment across the developing world, it becomes essential to evaluate the benefits of such investments. Impact evaluation helps in understanding the return to investment and helps policymakers design future corridor investments as well as complementary reforms.

Road traffic crashes are the eighth leading cause of death worldwide, with the majority of fatalities (93 percent) occurring in low- and middle-income countries. ieConnect brings economic structure to solving the road safety problem by using innovative methods to generate the needed data to understand the problem and by piloting and testing different road safety interventions through rigorous impact evaluations. These two approaches not only fill a knowledge gap as road safety in lower- and middle-income countries has been largely unexplored by rigorous impact evaluation research, but also increase our knowledge on the most effective solutions to solve the road safety problem and contribute to the SDG target 3.6 which seeks to halve road traffic deaths and injuries.

Impact Evaluations (IEs) on rural roads are important for policymaking because they inform rural road project delivery during design and implementation, document the impact of increasing access, and then help prioritize policies for countries. The spirit of IEs on rural roads is to leverage national investment in administrative data collection (including geospatial data, data from land registries, high-frequency price data), complemented with dedicated household survey data.

Transport plays a vital role in promoting development, providing access to essential services, social support networks and economic opportunity. One crucial component for sustainable and equitable urban transport is developing systems that serve women’s mobility needs since women and men travel differently. ieConnect works across different countries to address the constraints women face in urban mobility. Our projects seek to better understand and measure the types and extent of violence faced by women in public spaces and test interventions that aim to alleviate this violence and its negative consequences.

There is little research on the wider economic benefits of transport infrastructure in high fragility contexts—especially the resilience of economic agents when there is higher risk associated with the use of that infrastructure. ieConnect has conducted studies in fragile contexts which have generated knowledge and provided lessons to achieve progress in conflict-affected areas and lower middle-income countries. Our research provides evidence that helps to evaluate the contribution of transport to the twin development goals of decreasing extreme poverty and promoting shared prosperity as well as progress in reaching other Sustainable Development Goals, such as quality education and health. The team’s work can serve as a model for other projects, especially in high fragility or developing country contexts where data are often scarce, for example, by using geospatial data such as satellite imagery to evaluate corridors.

Given the catastrophic impacts of human-induced greenhouse gas emissions, combined with the fact that transport accounts for nearly a quarter of global energy-related CO2, growing faster than any other sector, additional research and knowledge is needed on the topic of air pollution and resilient transport infrastructure. The ieConnect program has focused specifically on measurement of air pollution, which is a first step to developing solutions and testing the effectiveness of those solutions. Additionally, it is looking at the important area of resilience and how innovative tools can help teams identify where to focus resources for ensuring a more resilient transport network. Going forward, to tackle transport decarbonization ieConnect can also help find effective ways to encourage technology adoption, support a just transition, and promote behavior change where the transition will be slowest, with a particular focus on distributional impacts.

COVID-19 response and recovery were included as an ieConnect program theme in 2020. Mobility was central to the spread of COVID-19, and understanding its patterns provided insights into how a disease might spread, and feed into decision making around how to control the situation. The ieConnect team used cell phone data to measure mobility based on changes in the towers from which calls are made. This data can also be considered for vaccine distribution planning or other medical resources, to measure impacts on other diseases, evaluate access to other resources such as food or social protection programs, and measure changes in travel and transportation, among other uses.