Publication: Through the Looking Glass: Lessons from the World Bank Afghanistan Portfolio for FCV Engagement
Loading...
Date
2022
ISSN
Published
2022
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
This paper aims to provide a gateway to the lessons learned from 7 critical years of program implementation (out of the 20 years of World Bank engagement since 2001) leading up to the political events of August 15, 2021. This will both support ongoing efforts to safeguard some gains of the long-term engagement by development partners and inform potential future interventions when the enabling environment would allow for a more comprehensive program. At the end of this report, we outline five initial takeaways (scope, adjustability, impact of analytics on design, sustainability, early thinking about transitioning between off and on-budget) that the World Bank and partners are testing in Afghanistan in the initial 12-14 months’ engagement post August 15, 2021. Following the political events of August 15, 2021, in Afghanistan, the World Bank paused all disbursements in its portfolio of 29 projects and over the next nine months repurposed this funding in Afghanistan. Reviewing the lessons from the paused portfolio was critical to the decision to make funds available again. By end-August 2022, the World Bank had completed 23 full Implementation Completion and Results Reports (ICRs) for its projects, in addition to five Non-Completion Notes (NCOs) for projects that had not become effective or disbursed. Currently, one regional project in the pre-August 2021 Afghanistan portfolio remains active. Pausing the disbursements under these projects meant that all activities halted as of August 15, 2021. The recently published country portfolio review of the UK Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI 2022) covers the same period (2014-21) as in this lessons learned document and draws three main conclusions: (a) comprehensive support should only be provided in the context of a viable and inclusive political settlement (and this was not the case in Afghanistan), (b) support should not finance paramilitary operations by police and security agencies (which the UK support did), and (c) spending levels should have been adjusted based on more thorough scenario planning. The authors will come back later in this paper to issues (a) and (c), as the same lessons also came up in the ICR: the limitations on the ability of government to deliver major programs under a political settlement that was not inclusive (and effectively meant the country remained in conflict) and the limited adjustability in programs are elements that deserve more reflection when engaging in similar situations and contexts in the future and should have a bearing in particular on the breadth and depth of support.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Ahmadzai, Atiqullah; Verheijen, Antonius; Hogg, Richard. 2022. Through the Looking Glass: Lessons from the World Bank Afghanistan Portfolio for FCV Engagement. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/38482 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Universities Through the Looking Glass : Benchmarking University Governance to Enable Higher Education Modernization in MENA(Washington, DC, 2012-03)This benchmarking exercise provided some important lessons on the tool itself and its capacity to: 1) identify strengths and weaknesses at individual institutions; 2) identify trends at the national level; 3) identify trends and practices by type of institution; and 4) generate interest to initiate reforms at the institutional, national, and regional levels. It is clear from this first round of data collection (and the subsequent increased demand and interest from institutions to participate), that universities are seeking to find meaningful ways to compare themselves with other institutions around the world, but more importantly, that they are genuinely interested in finding ways of improving their performance. Countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region are going through an important political transformation, and this is likely to impact their economic and social development for the next few years. The January 2011 revolution in Tunisia and Egypt's uprising transformed the political and social environments in both countries. In all MENA countries, recovery will depend on the capacity to develop new markets and to employ fiscal prudence. Universities play a key role in all societies because they are directly involved in generating new knowledge and because they teach and form young people to become leaders, entrepreneurs, scientists, and professionals in all fields of knowledge. In today's world, knowledge generation has replaced capital assets as the key ingredient for economic growth. Universities need to innovate to provide the kind of education that will enable their graduates to be competitive and to contribute to the economic and social growth of their countries.Publication Through the Looking Glass(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-07)This study conducted a randomized evaluation of a program in the Brazilian state of Ceara. The program was designed to improve teachers’ effectiveness by increasing their professional interaction and sharing of classroom practice. In 175 of 350 secondary schools, teachers were provided with benchmarked feedback from classroom observations and access to expert coaching. Schools’ uptake of the coaching program was high (85 percent). Over a single school year, the program increased teachers’ time on instruction and student engagement and produced statistically significant gains in student learning on the Ceara state assessment and the national secondary school exit exam. Controlling for individual students’ prior-year learning outcomes, schools exposed to the program had 0.05-0.09 standard deviation higher performance on the state test and 0.04-0.06 standard deviation higher scores on the national test. Implementation fidelity strongly boosted program impacts. In the 49 schools where the pedagogical coordinators achieved the highest certification at the end of the program, student scores were 0.13-0.23 standard deviation higher on the state test and 0.13-0.17 standard deviation higher on the national test. Coaching delivered by Skype kept the costs of the program low, $2.40 per student, and produced cost-effective impacts on learning in comparison with other rigorously evaluated teacher training interventions. The combination of classroom observation feedback and expert coaching appears to be a promising strategy for whole-school efforts to raise teacher effectiveness.Publication Glass Barriers(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-11)Trade facilitation projects often assume indirect benefits for small-scale, cross-border traders. Recent studies have shown the challenges faced in Africa by this population, especially women, but it remains unknown in Cambodia and the Lao People's Democratic Republic, despite large trade facilitation investments. This paper fills this gap, thanks to an innovative mix of original qualitative and quantitative data from various checkpoints on the borders with Thailand and Vietnam. The quantitative data, collected in 2014, consist of an exhaustive list of trade-related border crossings during two to three days and a survey of 158 randomly selected small-scale, cross-border traders and brokers. The paper combines qualitative data and statistical techniques to shed light on the structure of the small-scale, cross-border trade economy, traders' and brokers' profiles, the challenges they face, and potential solutions, with a particular emphasis on gender. Key challenges pertain to taxation and poor infrastructures. Narrow roads, insufficient parking space, and restrictive border regulations on transportation means cause traffic jams and delays. These disproportionately affect women, who are more time constrained. Despite a rather moderate tax pressure, widespread informal payments erode traders' and brokers' willingness to comply with taxes. Women suffer from a higher tax rate and a tax schedule that deters them from upgrading to more profitable cross-border trade activities. Along with capital constraints, this finding may explain the lower share of women in small-scale, cross-border trade than among own-account workers and the self-employed, as evidenced by nationally representative data. The paper delineates policy implications and puts forward concrete steps.Publication Virtual Windows Through Glass Walls? Digitalization for Low-Mobility Female Entrepreneurs(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-06-14)Social norms and childcare responsibilities often constrain women's mobility and work. This paper investigates the promise of digitalization in unlocking the growth of home-based businesses, an economic lifeline for women in developing countries. To do so, Jordanian female entrepreneurs were offered access to virtual storefronts through Facebook business pages, as well as access to an online digital marketing training created in collaboration with local social media influencers. After six months of hands-on support, treated women had higher business survival, weekly revenue, and attracted more online clients. Machine learning heterogeneity analysis reveals that higher business performance and limitations on the owner's ability to leave her house at baseline are particularly predictive of effects. Together, results suggest that when constraints to technology adoption are lifted, digitalization can unlock windows of opportunity to talented female entrepreneurs, especially those mobility-constrained among them.Publication Afghanistan in Transition : Looking beyond 2014(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2013-03-07)Afghanistan will experience a major security and development transition over the next three years. At the Kabul and Lisbon Conferences in 2010, the North Atlantic treaty organization and the Afghan government agreed that full responsibility for security would be handed over to the Afghan National Security Forces by the end of 2014. The country now faces the prospects of a drawdown of most international military forces over the coming several years, and an expected accompanying decline in civilian aid as international attention shifts elsewhere and aid budgets in many organization for economic cooperation and development countries come under increasing fiscal pressure. The decline in external assistance will have widespread ramifications for Afghanistan's political and economic landscape well beyond 2014. Ensuring the delivery of services to the Afghan people requires delegating more responsibilities to the provincial level. Only a tiny fraction of the Operation and Maintenance (O&M) budget gets outside the line ministries in Kabul. An important priority moving forward will be enhancing the capacity of provincial offices to participate in budget formulation and key spending ministries to execute their budgets subnationally. Without this, the government may find absorbing a greater proportion of aid on budget and delivering results to its people difficult.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Lebanon Economic Monitor, Fall 2022(Washington, DC, 2022-11)The economy continues to contract, albeit at a somewhat slower pace. Public finances improved in 2021, but only because spending collapsed faster than revenue generation. Testament to the continued atrophy of Lebanon’s economy, the Lebanese Pound continues to depreciate sharply. The sharp deterioration in the currency continues to drive surging inflation, in triple digits since July 2020, impacting the poor and vulnerable the most. An unprecedented institutional vacuum will likely further delay any agreement on crisis resolution and much needed reforms; this includes prior actions as part of the April 2022 International Monetary Fund (IMF) staff-level agreement (SLA). Divergent views among key stakeholders on how to distribute the financial losses remains the main bottleneck for reaching an agreement on a comprehensive reform agenda. Lebanon needs to urgently adopt a domestic, equitable, and comprehensive solution that is predicated on: (i) addressing upfront the balance sheet impairments, (ii) restoring liquidity, and (iii) adhering to sound global practices of bail-in solutions based on a hierarchy of creditors (starting with banks’ shareholders) that protects small depositors.Publication Classroom Assessment to Support Foundational Literacy(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-03-21)This document focuses primarily on how classroom assessment activities can measure students’ literacy skills as they progress along a learning trajectory towards reading fluently and with comprehension by the end of primary school grades. The document addresses considerations regarding the design and implementation of early grade reading classroom assessment, provides examples of assessment activities from a variety of countries and contexts, and discusses the importance of incorporating classroom assessment practices into teacher training and professional development opportunities for teachers. The structure of the document is as follows. The first section presents definitions and addresses basic questions on classroom assessment. Section 2 covers the intersection between assessment and early grade reading by discussing how learning assessment can measure early grade reading skills following the reading learning trajectory. Section 3 compares some of the most common early grade literacy assessment tools with respect to the early grade reading skills and developmental phases. Section 4 of the document addresses teacher training considerations in developing, scoring, and using early grade reading assessment. Additional issues in assessing reading skills in the classroom and using assessment results to improve teaching and learning are reviewed in section 5. Throughout the document, country cases are presented to demonstrate how assessment activities can be implemented in the classroom in different contexts.Publication The Journey Ahead(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-10-31)The Journey Ahead: Supporting Successful Migration in Europe and Central Asia provides an in-depth analysis of international migration in Europe and Central Asia (ECA) and the implications for policy making. By identifying challenges and opportunities associated with migration in the region, it aims to inform a more nuanced, evidencebased debate on the costs and benefits of cross-border mobility. Using data-driven insights and new analysis, the report shows that migration has been an engine of prosperity and has helped address some of ECA’s demographic and socioeconomic disparities. Yet, migration’s full economic potential remains untapped. The report identifies multiple barriers keeping migration from achieving its full potential. Crucially, it argues that policies in both origin and destination countries can help maximize the development impacts of migration and effectively manage the economic, social, and political costs. Drawing from a wide range of literature, country experiences, and novel analysis, The Journey Ahead presents actionable policy options to enhance the benefits of migration for destination and origin countries and migrants themselves. Some measures can be taken unilaterally by countries, whereas others require close bilateral or regional coordination. The recommendations are tailored to different types of migration— forced displacement as well as high-skilled and low-skilled economic migration—and from the perspectives of both sending and receiving countries. This report serves as a comprehensive resource for governments, development partners, and other stakeholders throughout Europe and Central Asia, where the richness and diversity of migration experiences provide valuable insights for policy makers in other regions of the world.Publication World Development Report 2006(Washington, DC, 2005)This year’s Word Development Report (WDR), the twenty-eighth, looks at the role of equity in the development process. It defines equity in terms of two basic principles. The first is equal opportunities: that a person’s chances in life should be determined by his or her talents and efforts, rather than by pre-determined circumstances such as race, gender, social or family background. The second principle is the avoidance of extreme deprivation in outcomes, particularly in health, education and consumption levels. This principle thus includes the objective of poverty reduction. The report’s main message is that, in the long run, the pursuit of equity and the pursuit of economic prosperity are complementary. In addition to detailed chapters exploring these and related issues, the Report contains selected data from the World Development Indicators 2005‹an appendix of economic and social data for over 200 countries. This Report offers practical insights for policymakers, executives, scholars, and all those with an interest in economic development.Publication Argentina Country Climate and Development Report(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-11)The Argentina Country Climate and Development Report (CCDR) explores opportunities and identifies trade-offs for aligning Argentina’s growth and poverty reduction policies with its commitments on, and its ability to withstand, climate change. It assesses how the country can: reduce its vulnerability to climate shocks through targeted public and private investments and adequation of social protection. The report also shows how Argentina can seize the benefits of a global decarbonization path to sustain a more robust economic growth through further development of Argentina’s potential for renewable energy, energy efficiency actions, the lithium value chain, as well as climate-smart agriculture (and land use) options. Given Argentina’s context, this CCDR focuses on win-win policies and investments, which have large co-benefits or can contribute to raising the country’s growth while helping to adapt the economy, also considering how human capital actions can accompany a just transition.