The World Bank

Performance evidence

World Bank Headquarters Washington, D.C.

Overview

MOPAN released its most recent assessment of the World Bank (IDA/IBRD) in 2023.

The World Bank (IDA/IBRD) was established in 1944 to help war-torn Europe rebuild its infrastructure. The creation of IDA in 1960 addressed an important gap by providing resources to low-income countries (LICs) that face issues of creditworthiness, complementing IBRD’s activities. The World Bank continues to demonstrate overall strong performance across multiple areas, culminating in a strong delivery of development results.

Notable strengths include the Bank’s strategic vision, financial framework, strong country engagement model, integrated risk management, safeguarding approach and results-based and adaptive approach to programming. However, the assessment identified opportunities that speak to the World Bank's role as a global convener and solutions bank working at the nexus of the public and private sector. As the World Bank embarks on its evolution, there is room to: (i) better demonstrate the uptake of its knowledge and advisory work to development outcomes; (ii) adopt a more strategic and results-driven approach to partnerships at the country and global level; (iii) Work more coherently and systematically across the public and private sectors to create an enabling environment for investment; and (iv) measure its contribution to outcomes for global themes.

Performance rating summary

World Bank organisational performance wheel 2023 — Organisational performance

Key findings

The strength of the Bank’s financial model is unparalleled, delivering clear value for the contributions of its members and other partners.
IDA’s hybrid financial model and prudential framework expands the scale of concessional funding available to eligible countries far beyond member contributions. Furthermore, IBRD’s new financial sustainability framework helps ensure sustainable lending over the medium term while allowing for flexibility to respond to crises and shocks.
Safeguards and integrity processes are embedded into the Bank’s country engagement model, ensuring consistency of application while also promoting the use and reinforcement of country system, particularly for environmental and social safeguards and financial management.
Internally, integrity and ethics functions conduct outreach to staff to reinforce awareness and trust in reporting and whistleblowing systems and use evidence to prevent risks before they materialise. The Bank’s efforts to prevent and respond to sexual exploitation and abuse and sexual harassment are particularly notable.

The Bank can strengthen its delivery on its comparative advantage in three key ways: (i) Working more systematically with IFC and MIGA as “One Bank Group;” (ii) strengthening its role as a convener to address global and transboundary development challenges; and (iii) better positioning its knowledge to promote policy coherence and reform.
The Bank’s knowledge products play an increasingly important role in its contributions to addressing global and regional public goods and ‘bads;’ there is scope to better integrate them into its overall strategic and results architecture. Beyond delivery of outputs and client perceptions of quality, there is room to better articulate how the Bank’s knowledge contributes to policy reform and coherence and supports its contribution to development outcomes across countries and regions.
Beyond difficulties in demonstrating results achieved for global themes, the Bank faces similar challenges demonstrating the sustainability of its operations. Strong mainstreaming of global themes has provided an important foundation for results. However, these are difficult to aggregate across a complex global portfolio and take time to mature.
The World Bank faces a complex development landscape characterised by increased fragility, vulnerability and sovereign debt. As it seeks to enhance its operating model and delivery of sustainable development results, it must balance its country engagement model with the delivery of global public goods, scale up the mobilisation of finance for the sustainable development agenda and support the implementation of the Paris Agreement through enabling policy reform and coherence.