Željko Bogetic | Lead economist and country sector coordinator worldbank.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from worldbank.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
I said in an earlier blog that I thought IDA is the world’s most effective source of external finance for overall development in its poorest countries. Perhaps it’s worth setting out the evidence for that in a little more detail.
The World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group has just issued a “Focused Assessment” of the IDA Private Sector Window, looking at the PSW’s first five years of operation. The PSW, launched in 2018, uses $5.6 billion of World Bank IDA financing to subsidize IFC and MIGA investments in the private sector through mechanisms including local currency financing and first loss guarantees. Six years after launch, it is still hard to do a proper analysis of the Window’s development impact.
The World Bank’s lending function is important and irreplaceable. But providing countries with an important source of financing and investing in evidence do not have to be in tension. The role of evaluation should shift from an assessment function to one in which evaluation is a central tool of project design and implementation within the World Bank.
The IDA provides around a quarter of its financing in grants, and the rest in concessional loans that can be repaid over 30-40 years, including a grace period of up to ten years.