01. Annual Reports & Independent Evaluations
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Publication
Learning and Adapting for Outcomes through the Management Action Record 2023: A World Bank Group Management Report on Implementation of IEG Recommendations
(Washington, DC, 2023-10-30)The Management Action Record (MAR) provides Management’s annual self-assessment of World Bank Group (WBG)-wide progress in implementing recommendations from the Independent Evaluation Group's (IEG) major evaluations to deliver outcomes in key priority areas. The MAR is an important vehicle for monitoring the uptake of IEG evaluations; it aims to ensure that recommendations lead to targeted actions that help shape the WBG’s strategic directions, improve its development effectiveness, and ultimately help countries achieve their development goals. This year’s MAR report provides updates on 59 recommendations from 22 IEG evaluations issued between FY19 and FY22, covering a diverse range of areas of strategic importance to the WBG. Building on progress achieved over the previous reporting cycles since the 2020 MAR Reform, this year’s MAR process featured enhanced candor in the self-assessment, a broader evidence base, and a widening of the teams involved in providing feedback to IEG for richer reporting. During this year’s MAR update cycle, Management continued its more intensive engagement approach, with more touchpoints, to enhance the MAR’s learning focus and build understanding between evaluators and technical staff. This has included the facilitation of dozens of evaluation-specific working meetings with IEG, involving over 130 participants from across the WBG, with representation from all relevant WB Global Practices, IFC, and MIGA regional and industry teams. -
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IFC Annual Report 2023: Building a Better Future
(International Finance Corporation, Washington, D.C., 2023-10-19)IFC, a member of the World Bank Group, is the largest global development institution focused on the private sector in emerging markets and developing economies. We work in more than 100 countries, using our capital, mobilization capacity, expertise, and influence to create jobs and raise living standards, especially for the poor and vulnerable. In fiscal year 2023, IFC committed a record 43.7 billion dollars to private companies and financial institutions in developing countries, leveraging the power of the private sector to improve people’s lives as economies grapple with the impacts of global compounding crises. -
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Evaluation Insight Note: Elements that Enhance Institutional Capacity Development in World Bank Projects and Country Partnerships in Sub-Saharan Africa
(Washington, DC, 2023-10-18)Evaluation Insight Notes (EIN) offer new insights from existing evidence on important strategic and operational issues. This EIN draws on Independent Evaluation Group evidence to identify lessons for addressing institutional capacity development needs in Sub-Saharan Africa. Institutions shape how countries foster poverty reduction, support sustainable growth, and respond during crises. World Bank projects and country partnerships operating in challenging contexts in Sub-Saharan Africa routinely integrate and show results in institutional capacity development. Addressing institutional challenges in these and similar contexts involves multiple organizations and is like running through a labyrinth because of the need for quick decisions, unclear processes, shifting objectives, and trial and error. The cases reviewed for this EIN consistently supported institutional reforms in a variety of challenging contexts with, for example, compromised financial systems, corruption, and civil conflict. To help navigate institutional capacity development, this Evaluation Insight Note (EIN) answers the question: How can the World Bank help address institutional capacity development needs in Sub-Saharan Africa based on the body of work of the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) from 2008 to 2022 Although an overall framework has not been defined to guide institutional capacity, the World Bank has often usefully diagnosed and addressed institutional capacity development needs by applying the Institutional Change Assessment Method. Using this method helps harness four elements that can enhance both the process and the results of institutional capacity development: (i) Routine integration of institutional capacity development in World Bank projects provides multiple entry points for enhancing processes of institutional change. (ii) Interventions with better institutional capacity development results tend to have higher outcome ratings. This implies that analyses from the Institutional Change Assessment Method can be used to adapt country portfolios in a way that improves outcome ratings. (iii) Because strengthening the ownership of interest groups is the most important dimension of institutional change in World Bank projects and country programs, its prioritization can help enhance results. (iv) Support for commitment, coordination, and cooperation helps improve institutional capacity development processes. (v) Support for commitment, coordination, and cooperation helps improve institutional capacity development processes. -
Publication
MIGA Annual Report 2023
(Washington, DC, 2023-10-17)Celebrating thirty-five years since its founding, in FY23 MIGA issued a record 6.4 billion in new guarantees across forty projects. Through these projects, the Agency remained focused on encouraging private investors to help host governments manage and mitigate political risks. In FY23, as it did during the COVID-19 pandemic, MIGA demonstrated its agility to respond to crisis, employing multiple products during the year to assist the embattled people of Ukraine following Russia’s invasion. An institution of the World Bank Group, MIGA is committed to strong development impact and supporting projects that are economically, environmentally, and socially sustainable. MIGA helps investors mitigate the risks of restrictions on currency conversion and transfer, breach of contract by governments, expropriation, and war and civil disturbance. It also offers trade finance guarantees, as well as credit enhancement on obligations of sovereigns, sub-sovereigns, state-owned enterprises, and regional development banks. -
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Creating an Enabling Environment for Private Sector Climate Action: An Evaluation of World Bank Group Support, Fiscal Years 2013–22
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-09-26)The private sector has a critical role to play in addressing climate change by investing in low-carbon technologies, developing new technologies, and building climate resilience into its investments and operations. Private sector financing will also be critical for meeting the needs for global finance flows, but climate finance from the private sector has been very low. One reason for this is that most countries lack a conducive enabling environment for the private sector to engage in climate action. This evaluation assesses the World Bank Group’s efforts to improve the enabling environment for private sector climate action (EEPSCA). The evaluation defines the private sector enabling environment for climate action as the set of policies (laws and regulations), incentives, standards, information, and institutions that encourage or facilitate the private sector to invest or behave in ways that reduce greenhouse gas emissions or adapt to the current or anticipated impacts of climate change. The private sector includes large, medium, and small firms; domestic and international financiers; and smallholder farmers or other producers. The evaluation assesses the relevance and effectiveness of Bank Group support to EEPSCA and aims to identify lessons applicable to the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation to inform implementation of the Bank Group Climate Change Action Plan 2021 and subsequent Bank Group climate activities. The evaluation also aims to inform discussions on the evolution road map, which considers further increasing the prominence of the role the Bank Group plays on global public goods, such as climate change. -
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. -
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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
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.