Targeted News Service

WASHINGTON, Dec. 2 -- The Inter-American Development Bank issued the following news release:

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Jamaica Secures Package of $6.7 Billion over Three Years in International Support for Recovery and Reconstruction After Hurricane Melissa

Following Hurricane Melissa and at the request of Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness, CAF - Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean, the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB), the Inter-American Development Bank Group (IDB Group), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank Group (WBG) have jointly assembled a comprehensive package of ... Show Full Article

IDB Approves $2 Billion Credit Line to Boost Basic Sanitation in Brazil

WASHINGTON, Dec. 2 -- The Inter-American Development Bank issued the following news release:

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IDB Approves $2 Billion Credit Line to Boost Basic Sanitation in Brazil

An initial individual operation of $204 million will finance a program with the Municipality of Belo Horizonte in the State of Minas Gerais.

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The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) Board of Executive Directors has approved a Conditional Credit Line for Investment Projects (CCLIP) of up to $2 billion to improve socio-environmental, socio-economic, and health conditions in Brazil. The program will promote the universalization ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Dec. 2 -- The Inter-American Development Bank issued the following news release: * * * IDB Approves $2 Billion Credit Line to Boost Basic Sanitation in Brazil An initial individual operation of $204 million will finance a program with the Municipality of Belo Horizonte in the State of Minas Gerais. * The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) Board of Executive Directors has approved a Conditional Credit Line for Investment Projects (CCLIP) of up to $2 billion to improve socio-environmental, socio-economic, and health conditions in Brazil. The program will promote the universalizationof basic sanitation, which includes water supply, sewage, drainage, and solid waste management, reducing regional gaps, improving environmental sustainability and climate resilience, and fostering operational efficiency and equity.

Within this credit line, the Board approved an initial individual operation of $204 million to finance a program with the Municipality of Belo Horizonte in the State of Minas Gerais.

More than 6,200 residents of vulnerable areas in Belo Horizonte will be resettled, either through compensation or access to safe housing. In addition, 47,500 people will benefit from new wastewater treatment services, and 2.5 million will be covered by early warning systems for extreme events.

The program supported by the new IDB credit line aims to reduce flood risks, increase access to improved sanitary sewer services, and strengthen the management of early warning systems in the city.

The program will support the construction of micro and macro drainage infrastructure; interventions in wastewater interceptors; urbanization projects; housing units for resettled families; as well as the rehabilitation and construction of new access roads to communities and public spaces.

It will also strengthen Belo Horizonte's municipal administration through the modernization of the hydrological monitoring and flood early warning system and the implementation of the Urban Water Management Program, which includes updating the drainage infrastructure registry and the Master Drainage Plan.

The first operation, for $204 million, has a repayment term of 23 and a half years, a grace period of 7 years, an interest rate based on SOFR, and a local counterpart of $51 million.

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About the IDB

The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), a member of the IDB Group, is devoted to improving lives across Latin America and the Caribbean. Founded in 1959, the Bank works with the region's public sector to design and enable impactful, innovative solutions for sustainable and inclusive development. Leveraging financing, technical expertise, and knowledge, it promotes growth and well-being in 26 countries. Visit our website: www.iadb.org/en.

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Original text here: https://www.iadb.org/en/news/idb-approves-2-billion-credit-line-boost-basic-sanitation-brazil

GSA Announces OneGov Agreement with SAP to Accelerate Federal IT Modernization

WASHINGTON, Dec. 2 -- The General Services Administration issued the following news release:

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GSA Announces OneGov Agreement with SAP to Accelerate Federal IT Modernization

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Agreement delivers up to 80% discounts on SAP solutions for federal agencies

WASHINGTON - Today, the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) announced a OneGov agreement with SAP providing federal agencies with discounted access to SAP's database, integration, analytics, and cloud solutions. The offer delivers up to 80 percent in discounts and is estimated to generate $165 million in savings for federal agencies ... Show Full Article

Inter-American Development Bank: 'Economic, Cultural and Taste-based Constraints to the Scaling of Climate-resilient Biofortified Maize Among Diverse Smallholder Populations in Guatemala'

WASHINGTON, Dec. 1 (TNSLrpt) -- The Inter-American Development Bank issued the following white paper in November 2025 entitled "Economic, Cultural and Taste-based Constraints to the Scaling of Climate-resilient Biofortified Maize among Diverse Smallholder Populations in Guatemala."

Here are excerpts:

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Introduction

Agriculture remains the main source of income for large shares of the rural population in lowand lower-middle-income countries. For many of the most vulnerable among them, it is also the main source of their own food consumption and nutrition. Smallholder farmers in these settings ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Dec. 1 (TNSLrpt) -- The Inter-American Development Bank issued the following white paper in November 2025 entitled "Economic, Cultural and Taste-based Constraints to the Scaling of Climate-resilient Biofortified Maize among Diverse Smallholder Populations in Guatemala." Here are excerpts: * * * Introduction Agriculture remains the main source of income for large shares of the rural population in lowand lower-middle-income countries. For many of the most vulnerable among them, it is also the main source of their own food consumption and nutrition. Smallholder farmers in these settingsare facing a myriad of challenges - irregular rainfall, cyclones, environmental degradation, pests and diseases, and macro price shocks, to name just a few - jeopardizing their livelihoods and food security. Public investment in R&D can theoretically play a role in offering solutions for some of these challenges, and breeding climate-resilient and biofortified crop varieties is often thought to hold particular promise. Yet slow and incomplete scaling of innovations resulting from such crop breeding efforts often seems to limit their potential returns.

Theoretically, there are a number of reasons why seed varieties of staple crops with "resilience" traits may not be scaling. Each seed variety offers a bundle of many different traits (yield, seed price, commercial value output, taste, nutrition, climate resilience, and pest susceptibility, to name only a few); farmers need to make trade-offs between these traits and have imperfect information about many of them. In addition, the returns to some traits (like climate resilience) are stochastic, while others (e.g., biofortification) have higher social than private returns. Furthermore, those with the easiest access to, or most information about, new seeds are also not necessarily those with the highest private returns. As the combination of human capital externalities and information asymmetries limits demand, the private sector - which helped drive the spread of high-yielding varieties during the Green Revolution - typically does not have incentives to scale these technologies. Supply-driven scaling models through the public sector or NGOs, on the other hand, often suffer from weak accountability and misaligned incentives. This paper analyzes the effectiveness of a scaling approach that aims to leverage private sector incentives, while also addressing the market imperfections limiting demand through information and subsidies.1

We focus on the case of recently released maize varieties in Guatemala that are biofortified - containing high levels of zinc, iron, and protein - and also purposely bred to increase resilience to climate shocks, reducing in particular the risk of crop losses from strong winds, a common and increasing climate hazard in Central America. The yields of these biofortified varieties compare favorably to traditional varieties and low-performing hybrids, but they come with a yield penalty compared to expensive hybrids marketed by international companies. Because biofortified seeds are sold through markets as a private good, they do not have canonical features of public goods in that they are neither nonrival nor nonexcludable. However, private markets are likely to undersupply biofortified varieties without public investment in their production and distribution, as the (perceived) private returns to farmers that grow them are likely to be smaller than the social returns. This is in part due to the unobservability of the nutrientenhanced content when selling on the market. In addition, even when harvests are used for the households' own consumption, farmers may undervalue the human capital benefits resulting from higher macro- and micronutrient content as they can be difficult to observe, the returns to such nutritional improvements may only come in a distant future, and/or benefits typically befall a different generation than the one making the investment decision.

While the principle of subsidies and information interventions to address these market imperfections is straightforward, there are a number of key design challenges to overcome for effective scaling of these varieties. For subsidies, a key challenge is how to ensure that they are additional rather than inframarginal; that is, how to provide opportunities for vulnerable smallholder farmers growing mainly for self-consumption to benefit from improved nutrition, while not wasting resources on wealthier commercial farmers who do not primarily grow for home consumption and also do not require public subsidies to meet their nutritional needs. A key insight around which our partner Semilla Nueva (SN) has designed their scaling strategy is that the biofortified seed's yield penalty means large commercial farmers should self-select out of these varieties (hence serving as a screening mechanism).2 Biofortified seeds can then be sold through agrodealers with subsidized prices calibrated to the low end of the seed price distribution (with an average sales price around 30% of that of the highest-cost varieties).

We study two enhanced approaches to scaling the biofortified seed dissemination, taking SN's strategy as a starting point: demand-side information and subsidies designed to encourage smallholder farmers to try the improved seeds, and supply-side subsidies for agrodealers to promote the biofortified seeds to a broad customer base. Supply-side subsidies can leverage market incentives and offer a potentially scalable policy option. Demand-side subsidies through discount vouchers, on the other hand, represent a more traditional policy tool that, in principle, can enable more precise targeting by delivering vouchers directly to the type of farmers whose families can be expected to benefit most from the biofortified seeds (though such targeting can be costly in itself). Targeted dissemination of information and discount vouchers can help reach farmers growing traditional (non-hybrid) varieties who may otherwise be unaware of new seed varieties at certain agrodealers. To the extent that one-time experimentation is enough to lead to subsequent adoption, such targeting can be short-lived.

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View full text here: https://publications.iadb.org/publications/english/document/Economic-Cultural-and-Taste-based-Constraints-to-the-Scaling-of-Climate-resilient-Biofortified-Maize-among-Diverse-Smallholder-Populations-in-Guatemala.pdf

[Category: IADB]

Inter-American Development Bank: 'Data Challenges and Innovations in Measuring Domestic Violence in Latin America and the Caribbean: Traditional Sources and Online Search Patterns'

WASHINGTON, Dec. 1 (TNSLrpt) -- The Inter-American Development Bank issued the following white paper in November 2025 entitled "Data Challenges and Innovations in Measuring Domestic Violence in Latin America and the Caribbean: Traditional Sources and Online Search Patterns."

Here are excerpts:

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Introduction

Domestic violence (DV) is a pervasive social problem, affecting at least one in four women aged 15-49 in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), as well as globally (Bott et al., 2019; Sardinha et al., 2022).1 This devastating phenomenon not only inflicts immediate harm but also leads ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Dec. 1 (TNSLrpt) -- The Inter-American Development Bank issued the following white paper in November 2025 entitled "Data Challenges and Innovations in Measuring Domestic Violence in Latin America and the Caribbean: Traditional Sources and Online Search Patterns." Here are excerpts: * * * Introduction Domestic violence (DV) is a pervasive social problem, affecting at least one in four women aged 15-49 in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), as well as globally (Bott et al., 2019; Sardinha et al., 2022).1 This devastating phenomenon not only inflicts immediate harm but also leadsto long-lasting negative consequences for victims, their families, and society at large (Campbell, 2002; Kitzmann et al., 2003). Moreover, exposure to DV can normalize violence as a method of conflict resolution, perpetuating the cycle of abuse across generations (Stith et al., 2000). Given the high prevalence, broad repercussions, and intergenerational transmission of DV, addressing this issue constitutes a critical development and public policy challenge for the region.

To effectively reduce and respond to DV, a comprehensive understanding of the issue is essential. A significant barrier to such understanding is the lack of reliable and systematic data on DV's prevalence and characteristics. Challenges including underreporting, social desirability and memory bias, selection bias, lack of comparability, and technical difficulties in data collection hinder the accuracy of both administrative and survey data on DV (Palermo et al., 2014; Cullen, 2023). These limitations result not only in imprecise prevalence estimates but also in constrained insight into the dynamics and consequences of DV, impeding the design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of effective policies and interventions (Bott et al., 2019).

Addressing these data limitations is therefore vital to improving the effectiveness of government responses to DV This study aims to contribute to overcoming these data limitations and to strengthening the understanding of DV in LAC in two distinct ways. First, we collect and analyze data from traditional sources on DV, including household surveys and administrative records, for several countries in the region. This effort contributes to systematizing existing data and provides a general overview of the DV situation in LAC. Second, we examine the properties of a novel indicator based on Google Trends data: the Google Domestic Violence Index (Google DV Index) (Berniell and Facchini, 2021; Anderberg et al., 2022a). This index captures the intensity of online searches related to DV and serves as a complementary data source that may help address some of the limitations of traditional statistics, thereby supporting a more comprehensive understanding of the issue.

In the first part of our analysis, we compile data from several publicly available traditional sources. Specifically, we use information from Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) (The DHS Program, 2024) and national surveys measuring DV, complemented by the latest wave of the World Values Survey (WVS) (2017-2022) (Haerpfer et al., 2022).

This effort yields insights across four key dimensions: the availability and periodicity of DV-related surveys, reported prevalence, attitudes toward DV, and reporting behavior.

We identified and compiled data from surveys on DV conducted between 2008 and 2021 across 18 LAC countries. This process revealed that survey efforts on DV remain sporadic across the region. In some cases, the most recent DHS or publicly available nationally representative survey dates back more than a decade, underscoring the absence of a systematic and sustained approach to collecting and disseminating comparable data across countries and over time.

Despite these limitations, the available surveys confirm that DV is a highly prevalent issue in the region. Although figures are not strictly comparable across countries, the results are nonetheless alarming: in each country included in our analysis, at least two in five women report having experienced victimization by an intimate partner at some point in their lives. In addition, data from the most recent wave (2017-2022) of the WVS highlight the ongoing need to shift societal attitudes: in nearly all countries surveyed, more than 10% of respondents report believing it is acceptable for a man to beat his wife.

National surveys also provide valuable insights into reporting behavior. According to the data, most DV (and particularly IPV) cases remain hidden and unreported.

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View full text here: https://publications.iadb.org/publications/english/document/Data-Challenges-and-Innovations-in-Measuring-Domestic-Violence-in-Latin-America-and-the-Caribbean-Traditional-Sources-and-Online-Search-Patterns.pdf

[Category: IADB]

Amtrak Supports VPRA with the Long Bridge Project

WASHINGTON, Dec. 1 -- Amtrak (National Railroad Passenger Corp.) issued the following news:

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Amtrak Supports VPRA with the Long Bridge Project

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Amtrak is proud to partner with the Virginia Passenger Rail Authority (VPRA) on the Long Bridge Project, a transformative investment in rail infrastructure that will:

* Unlock new capacity for both passenger and freight trains

* Improve safety and service reliability

* Stimulate economic opportunity for generations to come

To allow VPRA to complete this critical project, temporary Amtrak schedule adjustments will be necessary. During ... Show Full Article

Administrator Loeffler Applauds House Passage of "Made in America Manufacturing Finance Act"

WASHINGTON, Dec. 1 -- The Small Business Administration posted the following news release:

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Administrator Loeffler Applauds House Passage of "Made in America Manufacturing Finance Act"

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WASHINGTON Today, Kelly Loeffler, Administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) applauded the U.S. House of Representatives' bipartisan and unanimous passage of H.R. 3174, the Made in America Manufacturing Finance Act, which will double the SBA's loan limit from $5 million to $10 million for small manufacturers. The legislation was sponsored by Congressman Roger Williams (R-TX), Chairman ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Dec. 1 -- The Small Business Administration posted the following news release: * * * Administrator Loeffler Applauds House Passage of "Made in America Manufacturing Finance Act" * WASHINGTON Today, Kelly Loeffler, Administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) applauded the U.S. House of Representatives' bipartisan and unanimous passage of H.R. 3174, the Made in America Manufacturing Finance Act, which will double the SBA's loan limit from $5 million to $10 million for small manufacturers. The legislation was sponsored by Congressman Roger Williams (R-TX), Chairmanof the House Committee on Small Business.

"President Trump has built a strong foundation for the comeback of American industry by delivering historic tax cuts, deregulation, fair trade, and nearly $20 trillion in investment to support Made in America," said Administrator Loeffler. "Today, U.S. manufacturers - of which 98% are small businesses - require more capital to meet rising demand in an economy that is now being built by Americans, for Americans. With the bipartisan House passage of the Made in America Manufacturing Finance Act, manufacturers are one step closer to unlocking the capital they need to bring home American jobs and industry. The SBA is grateful to Chairman Williams for sponsoring this legislation and looks forward to its favorable consideration as it advances to the Senate."

"I want to thank Administrator Loeffler and my colleagues in the House and Senate for their collaboration on this critical legislation supporting America's small manufacturers," said Chairman Williams. "The Made in America Manufacturing Finance Act strengthens the ability of small manufacturers to invest, scale, and compete. These entrepreneurs are the backbone of our industrial base, and their success fuels our nation. With this legislation, we continue to advance an America First agenda that ensures Main Street remains the driving force in American innovation."

H.R. 3174 aligns with the SBA's Made in America Manufacturing Initiative, a broad effort launched by the agency earlier this year to rebuild industrial dominance by cutting regulations, expanding access to capital, highlighting the existing manufacturing base, and advancing a skilled manufacturing workforce.

As part of this Initiative, the agency previously launched a Make Onshoring Great Again Portal to help small manufacturers identify domestic producers and shift supply chains back home. More recently, the agency launched the 7(a) Manufacturer's Access to Revolving Credit (MARC) Loan Program, the SBA's first-ever loan program dedicated to supporting America's small manufacturers. SBA also announced that it will waive most upfront fees for small manufacturers (NAICS 31-33) in Fiscal Year 2026 to support investment in U.S. production and growth.

About the U.S. Small Business Administration

The U.S. Small Business Administration helps power the American dream of entrepreneurship. As the leading voice for small businesses within the federal government, the SBA empowers job creators with the resources and support they need to start, grow, and expand their businesses or recover from a declared disaster. It delivers services through an extensive network of SBA field offices and partnerships with public and private organizations. To learn more, visit www.sba.gov.

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Original text here: https://www.sba.gov/article/2025/12/01/administrator-loeffler-applauds-house-passage-made-america-manufacturing-finance-act

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