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Development Impact Group

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ieConnect

The ieConnect for Impact program is a collaboration between DIME and the Transport Global Practice with a shared and common vision of ¡°¡±. Managed by a dedicated team within DIME, the program has been financed by the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office (FCDO) and the European Union, amongst others. FCDOs contribution has been driven by the Growth Research Team in Research and Evidence Division (RED).

To date, the ieConnect program has enabled the evaluation of over US$5.7 billion in transport investment projects. The program¡¯s technical assistance, capacity building, and analytical and advisory support are designed to help leverage additional financing from international financial institutions, national governments, and other development partners. Additionally, FCDO¡¯s catalytic contributions to the program have encouraged others to invest. Over the lifetime of the program, partner governments, other parts of the WB, and other development partners have contributed more than 177% of the value of FCDO¡¯s total investment towards the cost of delivering the IEs, bringing the share of FCDO's financing of the program down to 36%. Some examples include DIME's collaboration with the European Union to support research in transport and infrastructure space in Kenya and Senegal, and with the French Development Agency (AFD) supporting our programs in Nigeria and Senegal.

The program works across several thematic areas, which are further detailed below. Additional information and research generated by the team can be found on ieConnect¡¯s dedicated program page here.

Themes

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.