Foreword -- Acknowledgments --Acronyms and data note -- Pt. 1. World Bank support for investing in people -- Pt. 2. Examples of Bank assistance -- Improving outcomes by concentrating resources to get the most value: 1. Bringing Pakistani girls to the front of the class -- 2. Stipends to keep Bangladeshi girls in school -- 3. Closing the life expectancy gap in Hungary -- 4. Targeting Indonesia's poor -- 5. Improving the performance of Tunisia's public hospitals -- 6. Integrating reproductive health care in Zimbabwe -- Listening, learning, and working with communities and households : 7. Food coupons for better nutrition in Honduras -- 8. Enlisting participation in India-on a grand scale -- 9. Reaching Mexican children early -- 10. Fueling Nigerian women's entrepreneurial drive -- 11. Working with poor communities in the Philippines-for better health -- 12. Listening to Tanzanian communities-to find out what's really wrong -- Collaborating with partners: 13. Partnerships fighting AIDS in Brazil -- 14. Results from long collaboration in Tunisia -- 15. Turning the tables for Zambia's health system -- 16. Controlling riverblindness in West Africa -- 17. New-and sensible-ways of doing business in Africa

Investing in people is at the core of the World Bank ' s work. Bank lending for education, health, nutrition, population, and other aspects of human resource development has increased sharply in recent years and is now averaging more that billion a year. The Bank has intensified its support for effective primary services, where the impact on economic growth and poverty reduction is greatest. It has also increased its emphasis on education of girls, women ' s reproductive health, nutrition, early childhood development, and other urgent priorities. The purposes of this booklet are two. One, is to provide for audiences unfamiliar with the World Bank, a short introduction to how the Bank supports developing countries ' efforts to improve education, health care, nutrition, family planning, and other means of promoting human development. Two, is to present a selection of leading examples of recent Bank-supported activities in human development. Drawn from all regions of the developing world and all subsectors of human development, the examples demonstrate new approaches or reflect the lessons of past efforts. In its future work, the Bank will continue to: a) increase its lending devoted to investment in people; b) emphasize the basics - working with countries to increase access to better-quality, more cost-effective services; c) give special attention to early childhood development, including immunizations, preschool education program, and the provision of vitamins and other nutritional supplements; d) pursue a comprehensive, integrated approach to population policy emphasizing both the demand for and the supply of family planning services, women ' s health, and women ' s education; e) further increase operations designed to remove barriers to women ' s participation in economic development; and f) work with all borrowers and partners in a joint effort to help attain universal primary education of good quality, universal access to a minimum package of cost-effective health care, and the elimination of malnutrition.