IEG Independent Evaluations & Annual Reviews
456 items available
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Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) publications assess what works, and what does not; how a client plans to run and maintain a project; and the lasting contribution of the World Bank Group to a country's overall development. The goals of evaluation are to learn from experience, to provide an objective basis for assessing the results of the World Bank Group's work, and to provide accountability in the achievement of its objectives. IEG superseded the former Operations Evaluation Department.
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Publication
The World Bank Group’s 2018 Capital Increase Package - An Independent Validation of Implementation and Results
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-08-29)This report presents the Independent Evaluation Group’s validation of the World Bank Group’s 2018 capital increase package (CIP). It assesses the World Bank Group’s progress in implementing the CIP’s policy measures and achieving its targets, as well as the quality of management’s CIP reporting. The 2018 CIP boosted the Bank Group’s financial firepower with a $7.5 billion paid-in capital increase for the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), $5.5 billion paid-in capital increase for the International Finance Corporation (IFC), $52.6 billion callable capital increase for IBRD, and internal savings measures. The CIP also included a policy package that committed Bank Group management to policy actions linked to the Bank Group’s 2016 Forward Look strategy. The CIP committed to reporting annually on its implementation and an independent assessment after five years. This report fulfills the commitment to an independent assessment. This validation builds on management’s own reporting and other complementary evidence to assess the World Bank Group’s progress in implementing the CIP’s policy measures and achieving its targets. The report also assesses the quality of management’s CIP reporting. The report points to lessons on developing, implementing, and reporting corporate initiatives and commitments, such as the importance of having clear strategies or action plans, explicit buy-in from senior management, and accurate reporting with meaningful indicators and realistic targets. -
Publication
Financial Inclusion: Lessons from World Bank Group Experience, Fiscal Years 2014–22
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-08-28)This evaluation explores how and with what effect the World Bank Group has supported financial inclusion for the microenterprises, poor households, women, and other excluded groups. Financial inclusion is defined as the use of financial services by individuals and firms. It encompasses financial access—owning an account—and the use of financial services. There has been an impressive growth in account ownership globally, from 55% of adults in 2014 to 71% in 2021, although usage is more limited as some accounts are inactive. Critically, both financial access and the use of financial services remain major challenges for microenterprises, poor households, women, and other excluded groups. The objective of the evaluation is to assess whether the Bank Group has been doing the right things and whether it has been doing things right on financial inclusion. The evaluation captures lessons from the World Bank’s experience supporting financial inclusion for microenterprises, poor households, women, and other excluded groups and updates a 2015 financial inclusion evaluation. The evaluation includes a retrospective look at the drive for universal financial access and examines progress and challenges in women’s access to financial services. The evaluation also assesses the Bank Group’s support for digital financial services as vehicles for financial inclusion. Finally, the report examines the World Bank’s response to COVID-19 as it relates to financial inclusion. The evaluation proposes three recommendations: (i) The World Bank and IFC should further encourage account use by underserved groups, including women and rural poor people, and emphasize this more in their strategies and projects. (ii) The World Bank and IFC should design and implement more comprehensive approaches that address constraints in the enabling environment for DFS to reach underserved and excluded groups. (iii) To enhance learning on what works to increase the beneficial use of financial services at the MPWEG, the World Bank and IFC should collect outcome data across different underserved and excluded groups, initially on a pilot basis. -
Publication
Adaptive Social Protection for Effective Crisis Response: Independent Evaluation Group Evaluation of the World Bank’s Contribution (Approach Paper)
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-08-24)Interconnected and often devastating covariate shocks are a threat to human development. Covariate shocks are shocks that affect large numbers of people or communities at once and can be natural, economic, or political. Occurrence and the human devastation from natural disasters has increased over the last 50 years, and the negative impacts of climate change are expected to exacerbate this trend. Poor households are particularly vulnerable to covariate shocks because they lack adequate capacity to prepare for, cope with, and adapt to shocks. Covariate shocks can also impoverish vulnerable households when their capacity to prepare, cope, and adapt is overwhelmed. Covariate shocks vary in magnitude, speed of onset, predictability, and duration, and thus these aspects should be considered when designing the most appropriate social protection response. Moreover, the needs and challenges that vulnerable and directly affected populations face will have implications for social protection systems. Adaptive social protection (ASP) builds resilience by helping poor and vulnerable households prepare for, cope with, and adapt to covariate shocks. The purpose of this evaluation is twofold: (i) assess whether the World Bank support for social protection has incorporated adaptive elements over time, and (ii) assess how effective the World Bank has been at helping client countries make their social protection systems more adaptive. -
Publication
World Bank Support to Georgia, Fiscal Years 2014-23: Country Program Evaluation (Approach Paper)
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-08-10)The Country Program Evaluation (CPE) will seek to assess how well the Bank Group–supported strategy was aligned with Georgia’s main development challenges and how effective the Bank Group’s support was in addressing these challenges. The evaluation seeks to identify lessons that support the further adaptation and refinement of Bank Group engagement in support of the country’s development priorities. -
Publication
The World Bank Group in the Kyrgyz Republic: Country Program Evaluation, Fiscal Years 2014–21
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-08-10)This report assesses the relevance and effectiveness of the World Bank’s engagement in the Kyrgyz Republic between fiscal years 2014 and 2021. The Kyrgyz Republic is a landlocked, lower-middle-income country that is highly dependent on remittances and natural resources. Poverty levels declined from 37% in 2013 to 20% in 2019. However, the country’s population remains vulnerable, and broad-based economic growth was elusive over the evaluation period. The Kyrgyz Republic faces major development challenges including weak governance, barriers to private sector development, and low quality of essential local public services. This Country Program Evaluation assesses the relevance and effectiveness of the World Bank’s engagement in the Kyrgyz Republic between fiscal years 2014 and 2021. It evaluates the Bank’s contributions to the country’s development in priority areas, focusing on support for governance, private sector development, and essential local public services. The evaluation distills lessons from Bank Group experience to inform future Bank Group engagement in the Kyrgyz Republic. -
Publication
Addressing Gender Inequalities in Countries Affected by Fragility, Conflict, and Violence: An Evaluation of the World Bank Group’s Support
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-08-10)Conflict and fragility increase the exposure of women and girls to gender-based violence (GBV) and make it more difficult for them to access social services, including sexual and reproductive health services. Fragility, conflict, and violence (FCV) also exacerbate their vulnerability to poverty and increase their unpaid work burden from their caregiving role. The increase of situations of fragility and conflict in recent years has called the World Bank Group to step up its engagement in these contexts and to adapt its approach to address gender inequalities in FCV countries. The Bank Group recognizes in many corporate and strategic documents, such as the 2020-2025 FCV strategy, that for Bank Group support to produce meaningful and lasting results toward greater gender equality in FCV countries, it needs to have five specific elements. These elements include relevance, depth, sustainability, scale, and inclusive ownership. The evaluation uses these elements to assess the Bank Group’s country support for women’s and girls’ economic empowerment (WGEE) and GBV prevention and response. The evaluation analyzes in depth the experiences of six countries (Burkina Faso, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Lebanon, the Solomon Islands, and the Republic of Yemen) where the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation (IFC) provided support to advance WGEE and address GBV during the past 10 years. The report draws on a combination of in-depth desk review of documents, more than 200 interviews of World Bank and IFC staff, government partners, and national and international stakeholders, and field visits, focus group discussions, and face-to-face interviews in. The evaluation analyzes the factors that enable and constrain meaningful and lasting results in addressing gender inequalities in FCV contexts and offers four recommendations to inform future Bank Group support. -
Publication
International Finance Corporation Platforms Approach: Addressing Development Challenges at Scale - An Independent Evaluation (Approach Paper)
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-08-03)Recurring development challenges and new compounding crises affecting client countries and firms constrain the ambition of the International Finance Corporation (IFC) to contribute to attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. The recurring challenges, including insufficient private sector participation in development financing, continue to affect emerging markets and developing economies and the firms within them. Two related initiatives—the IFC capital increase and the IFC 3.0 strategy—underpin IFC’s goal to contribute to the SDGs by 2030. IFC’s capital increase package was based on the IFC 3.0 strategy, which requires creating new markets through advisory and upstream services and mobilizing private capital from new sources and through new approaches (IFC 2017, 2018, 2020a). IFC has introduced a platforms approach to scale up its interventions in accordance with IFC 3.0 and the capital increase objectives. IFC defines platforms as thematic interventions—at a regional, global, or sectoral level—designed to address a specific development challenge (IFC 2022b). The main purpose of the evaluation is to assess whether the platforms approach offers IFC a means to achieve its capital increase and IFC 3.0 objectives while meeting the Board’s and clients’ expectations. -
Publication
Focused Assessment of the International Development Association’s Private Sector Window: An Update to the 2021 Early-Stage Assessment by the Independent Evaluation Group (Approach Paper)
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-07-27)Attracting private capital and developing the private sector in low-income countries are challenging. The challenges involved in mobilizing private capital and developing the private sector in many IDA countries, especially those that are fragile and conflict-affected situations (FCS), are substantial (World Bank 2016). In many of these countries, the domestic private sector is small, informal, and constrained by a weak macroeconomic and regulatory environment, infrastructure bottlenecks, and a limited skilled labor force. High country risks and capital flight concerns make domestic and international investors reluctant to engage, particularly in FCS, which also experience security risks. As a result, IDA countries’ ability to attract private investment and grow the local private sector remains limited. The assessment will update a previous IEG evaluation of the Private Sector Window (PSW) and complement a concurrent paper by the International Development Association (IDA), the International Finance Corporation (IFC), and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA). This focused assessment (the PSW evaluation update) responds to a request by the Committee on Development Effectiveness and World Bank Group management for IEG to prepare an update to The World Bank Group’s Experience with the IDA Private Sector Window: An Early-Stage Assessment (World Bank 2021), which was completed by IEG in July 2021 and covered the PSW implementation experience under the 18th Replenishment of IDA (IDA18) for fiscal years 2018–20. The PSW evaluation update will add IDA19 and early IDA20 PSW projects. Concurrently, IDA, IFC, and MIGA are jointly preparing a paper on the PSW as an input to the IDA20 Mid-Term Review, focused on implementation progress and early results of the PSW (the IDA PSW paper). The IEG and IDA-IFC-MIGA teams working on the two assessments have agreed to conduct complementary analyses to inform the Mid-Term Review. -
Publication
Machine Learning in Evaluative Synthesis: Lessons from Private Sector Evaluation in the World Bank Group
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-07-20)This resource discusses the use of machine learning (ML) techniques in evaluation research and their potential to automate the process of extracting and classifying large amounts of texts. ML methods can accelerate the process of extracting and classifying content in evaluation research provided that practitioners train the extraction tool properly. In practical terms, such an approach can offer evaluators a powerful analytical tool for a range of evaluative purposes, for example, for better understanding the various determinants of project success, potential challenges to project implementation, and practical lessons for future projects, among others. With the above goal in mind, the paper provides an overview of ML and discusses relevant applications in the field of evaluation. This is supported by the case of the Finance and Private Sector Evaluation Unit of the Independent Evaluation Group as an example to illustrate the benefits of ML for text classification in evaluation. The paper concludes by offering a summary of the results of this experiment and a brief discussion of potential next steps. -
Publication
The World Bank Group’s Engagement in Morocco, Fiscal Years 2011–21: Country Program Evaluation
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-06-21)This Country Program Evaluation assesses the development effectiveness of the World Bank Group’s support to Morocco between fiscal year FY11 and FY21. The report evaluates the World Bank Group’s contribution in solving four systemic constraints to Morocco’s development: (i) lack of policy coherence with the country’s development aspirations; (ii) an uneven economic playing field that favors some firms and stateowned enterprises (SOEs), creates rent-seeking behaviors, and discourages new entrants; (iii) weak policy implementation caused by the limited public sector capacity to carry out reforms; and (iv) weak citizen, labor force, and subnational participation in the country’s development. This evaluation identifies lessons to guide future World Bank engagement in Morocco, including: (a) at times, it is possible for the World Bank to gain traction in Morocco’s policy reforms by trading recognition for influence; (b) global benchmarking data can be effectively utilized to motivate reforms; (c) IFC can significantly impact the business environment and financial architecture reforms by effectively deploying its advisory work to influence major companies, including SOEs, in making institutional changes; (d) the experience of PforR operations in Morocco suggests that to maximize their effectiveness, the World Bank needs to proactively involve the full range of stakeholders and ensure resources are deployed for technical assistance gaps; and (e) engagement at the subnational level requires the ability and willingness to take new risks and experiment with new approaches.