Please keep me in touch with this letter you intend sending to the Bank re GDG and open information.

I have been doing some work on "knowledge-based aid" and one dimension of this must be to look critically at the Gateway and other initiatives concerned with the globalisation of devt knowledge.

I attach a paper above which I did on this some months back.

When the world's least developed countries (LDCs) - described as the poorest of the poor - gather at a key international conference in Brussels in May, their numbers may once again rise: from the current 48 to 49. The country with the dubious honour of having its failing economy downgraded would be Senegal - although the Republic of Congo and Ghana are not far behind.

The Nile Council of Ministers that comprises water ministers from the nine Nile Basin states, has endorsed development projects of the region's water, hydroelectric and environmental resources, sources said.

The purpose of the paper is to understand the causes of policy reform in Tanzania. It covers the time period from the beginning of the severe economic crisis in Tanzania in 1979 up to the present, but to put this in perspective it also briefly outlines the policies pursued before that. The study investigates how aid has encouraged, generated, influenced, supported or even retarded reforms.