Also This Month

Review and Update of the World Bank Safeguard Policies:   The 3rd phase of consultations on a revised (second) draft kicked off in August. In coming weeks, multi-stakeholder consultations will take place in the following countries: Egypt, Belgium, Morocco, Indonesia, Kenya and Honduras. More

World Bank Group Country Strategies: In this edition, we highlight the recently published Country Partnership Framework for Bosnia and Herzegovina.Access more of the latest country engagement documents here.

Sustainable Development Goals: Keeping Citizens at the Center: . On January 28, 2016 at 3:30pm, the GPSA will host a round table discussion that will address how citizens can help drive the accountable implementation of the SDGs. Learn more here.

Call for Videos for the 2016 Fragility Forum - Deadline,February 5: To raise awareness about the crucial role that CSOs play in fragile contexts, we are looking for video submissions to showcase during the upcoming World Bank Fragility Forum. More detailshere.

Help us Improve the WBG’s Newsletters: Please take a quick survey to let us know what you think of our newsletters, and how we could improve them. More details

Upcoming Events

World Bank Fragility Forum: Washington DC, March 1-3, 2016

IMF/World Bank 2016 Spring Meeting Civil Society Policy Forum: Washington DC, April 12 -15, 2016

3rd GPSA Global Partners Forum, Washington DC, May 19-20, 2016

Blogs

A new Strategy to Address Gender Inequality: In thisblog World Bank Managing Director and Chief Operating Officer, Sri Mulyani Indrawati talks about the WBG’s newGender Equality Strategy and its ambitious path towards improving opportunities for women and girls.

Flipping the Development Classroom:  In this blog
WBG’s Learning Specialist, Sheila Jagannathan talks about the important role that eLearning can play in development, and showcases the WBG’s newly launchedOpen Learning Campus.

Digital Revolution Needs Offline Help 



While the Internet, mobile phones, and other digital technologies are spreading rapidly through the developing world, the anticipated development benefits from using these technologies have lagged behind, and 60 percent of the world’s population remains excluded from the digital economy. Read more in the World Bank’s 2016 Development Report: Digital Dividends.

2016 Spring Meetings Civil Society Policy Forum – Call for Session Proposals to launch soon

The next CSPF will convene from April 12 – 15, 2016. CSO representatives are invited to submit proposals for policy sessions on social and economic development topics by Friday, February 26. More details and a link to the session proposal form can be foundhere  in the coming week.

Request for Feedback on the Civil Society Policy Forum (CSPF)

We would like to hear your views on how to improve the CSPF held at the Spring and Annual Meetings. More details are availablehere. Comments should be submitted no later than February 8. We hope to use these to put together a more robust and transparent CSPF by the 2016 Annual Meetings

New WBG Gender Equality Strategy Launched 



The World Bank Group has launched its new Gender Equality Strategy for 2016-2023. Informed by months of consultationsin 22 countries with governments, CSOs, and the private sector, the strategy sets ambitious targets, establishes a new methodology for measuring progress, and outlines an agenda to close persistent gender gaps so critical to economic development.

World Bank Group's PPPs Consultation Period Currently Open and Extended tillFebruary 29th

The WBG Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) team is seeking your feedback for two resources that address the issues of disclosure and gender in PPPs.  To provide input on the framework for public disclosure of information in public-private partnership transactions and complete the questionnaire, please click here.  To provide feedback on the impact of PPPs on gender inclusion, plase click here, and [email protected] with your feedback.  Deadline for both is  February 29, 2016.

Free World Bank Course on Citizen Engagement Starts February 1, 2016

The WBG will be launching the second delivery of its free Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Citizen Engagement onFebruary 1. This latest version will include a new module that looks at Citizen Engagement in practice and was developed in partnership with the London School of Economics (LSE), the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), Participedia, and CIVICUS. It will be hosted on Coursera’s MOOC platform through the World Bank Group’s new Open Learning Campus. For more information and to enrollsee here.

Launch of Enabling the Business of Agriculture (EBA) 2016 Report

EBA’s report - covering 40 countries and a range of topic areas - will be released next week. The report provides users with a set of data and indicators that facilitates benchmarking of regulations that impact the enabling environment for business in the sector. The report will be posted here.

This Newsletter is produced by the Civil Society Team of the World Bank Group (WBG) in collaboration with other WBG units. The Newsletter highlights several policies, programs, and initiatives of the WBG which may involve or be of interest to CSOs. We welcome your comments and feedback to make this newsletter as useful as possible. You can subscribe to the Newsletter using a new registration page. Please share your comments on the Newsletter with us: [email protected]. All past issues of the Newsletter can be found at here. To unsubscribe click here. For more on the World Bank - Civil Society Engagement, visit our website.