Sound Strategy, Broken Platform · An Assessment of the WBG FCV Strategy 2026–2030 · MDB Reform Platform
The new strategy makes jobs its organizing principle — “the issue on which we can contribute most.” It assigns delivery to the Global Practices with the weakest record in exactly the countries it targets, and adopts a jobs agenda without a jobs metric.
The benchmark is S+ (Satisfactory or above) — the threshold IFC, MIGA, AIIB, ADB, and the EIB all apply to their own portfolios. IEG’s own scale defines Moderately Satisfactory as achieving most objectives but with significant shortcomings — explicitly below Satisfactory. IDA’s lending arm is the only development finance institution in this comparison using Moderately Satisfactory or above (MS+) as its corporate benchmark. The gap between the two standards is 35–50 percentage points across key portfolios, and it is what makes a portfolio of zero-Satisfactory country–sector combinations — the “Zero Club” — invisible in headline reporting.
The question is operational, not strategic. The strategy’s diagnosis is sound and several of its elements are genuine advances. This assessment does not contest the theme. It asks a narrower question the strategy does not answer: the new strategy makes jobs the centre of its mandate — so who will deliver the jobs, through which vehicles, and what is the record in those vehicles in the countries the strategy is for?
The 2026–2030 FCV Strategy is well-constructed, and its forward-looking classification, trajectory-shifting-actions concept, and IFC-reform candour are genuine advances. But it places its central bet — jobs — on the part of the delivery machinery with the weakest history. In the six Global Practices on which every jobs agenda depends, 77.6 percent of FCS commitments are below Satisfactory. Finance, Competitiveness & Innovation — the Global Practice whose mandate is private-sector jobs — runs 22.6 percent Satisfactory. IFC’s investment-outcome rate in fragile states is 11 percent. The strategy proposes to scale exactly these vehicles.
Ghana is the emblem: 14 FCI projects, $615 million, 27 years, zero rated Satisfactory — a portfolio of projects titled “Enterprise Development” and “Competitiveness and Job Creation” whose monitoring systems rarely tracked employment. The jobs machine did not measure whether it created jobs. The new strategy carries the same gap forward: its institutional outcome for MSME jobs has an indicator “to be determined based on the forthcoming MSME Strategy.” A jobs strategy, adopted without a jobs metric.
Unbundled against its 2020 predecessor, the strategy changed its organizing principle and its country classification while inheriting the 2020 delivery apparatus intact — RRAs, the FCV Envelope, the IDA21 allocation framework, the CPF cycle. It concedes, in its own words, that the last strategy failed to translate ambition into outcomes — then proposes the same machinery, with accountability tracked through whether country strategies mention the right concepts rather than whether projects work. The outcome-level IEG evaluation of the 2020 strategy does not report until FY2027 — after this one is in force.
The Strategy’s Bet: Jobs
The 2026–2030 FCV Strategy reorganises the World Bank Group’s engagement in fragile settings around a single organizing principle: jobs. “Jobs are where we have the clearest mandate and the strongest comparative advantage,” the Group states. The strategy anchors job creation in five sectors — infrastructure and energy, agribusiness, primary healthcare, tourism, and value-added manufacturing — delivered through a three-pillar approach (foundations; business-enabling reforms; financing and capabilities) and, above all, through MSMEs and the domestic private sector, “the backbone of employment in many FCV economies.”
This is a real reorientation of posture, and it is directionally sound. The question this assessment puts is the operational one the document leaves unanswered: the vehicles through which jobs will be delivered are nameable — and so is their record in the countries the strategy targets.
Who Will Deliver? The Vehicles and Their Record
The strategy delivers the jobs agenda through MSMEs and the private sector (IFC and MIGA, pending the forthcoming MSME Strategy and IFC 2030) and through corporate flagship initiatives, each of which maps to a Global Practice. Set each vehicle against the Zero Club record of its Global Practice in Sub-Saharan Africa — countries with two or more evaluated projects and zero percent Satisfactory — and the pattern is consistent.
| Jobs vehicle in the strategy | Global Practice | Zero Club reach (Sub-Saharan Africa) |
|---|---|---|
| MSMEs / domestic private sector | Finance, Competitiveness & Innovation | 14 countries, 55 projects, $1.7bn at 0% · GP-wide 22.6% S+ |
| DPF-led reform for jobs | Macroeconomics, Trade & Investment | 13 countries, 97 projects, $10.4bn at 0% · MTI/DPO 19.5% S+ |
| M300 — energy access | Energy & Extractives | 10 countries, 36 projects, $11.4bn at 0% |
| Education & Skills Strategy | Education | 10 countries, 33 projects, $2.5bn at 0% |
| 1.5bn health target | Health, Nutrition & Population | 14 countries, 55 projects, $3.0bn at 0% |
| AgriConnect — farmer transition | Agriculture & Food | 4 countries, 14 projects, $0.9bn at 0% |
| SP500 — social protection / jobs | Social Protection & Jobs | 3 countries, 8 projects, $0.2bn at 0% |
Source: mdbreform.com, The Zero Club — Cross-Sector Synthesis (3,020 evaluated SSA projects, IEG ICRR/PPAR master database, March 2026). Descriptive, not causal.
The S+ rate by jobs vehicle — and the instrument the strategy does not default to
PforR — the one instrument that forces measurable results before disbursement — is mentioned once and is not the FCS default. The vehicles the strategy scales are the ones below it.
The private-sector engine the strategy relies on most is the one running coldest. IFC’s investment-outcome rate in fragile states reached 11 percent (CY2020–22); additionality was realised in roughly a third of FCS projects; the IDA18 Private Sector Window deployed $2.5 billion without producing a net increase in IFC’s FCS commitments. The strategy proposes to scale precisely this engine, while conceding in its own text that engagement “has remained constrained” and that the Bank “did not meet expectations of impact when engaging with the private sector” (p.19). Scaling a vehicle does not change its conversion rate.
Ghana: The Jobs Machine That Did Not Create — or Measure — Jobs
Ghana FCI is the case the jobs agenda has to answer. Fourteen Finance, Competitiveness & Innovation projects over twenty-seven years (FY1997–FY2024), $615 million committed, zero rated Satisfactory — five Moderately Satisfactory, five Moderately Unsatisfactory, four Unsatisfactory. The entire upper half of the rating scale is empty. The projects carried titles explicitly oriented toward employment — ‘Enterprise Development,’ ‘Private Sector Development,’ ‘Competitiveness and Job Creation.’ Across a sector whose mandate is jobs, IEG’s evaluations rarely record employment outcomes, because monitoring systems rarely tracked them. The jobs machine did not measure whether it created jobs.
The successor is the same instrument at larger scale. The FY22–26 Country Partnership Framework reflects genuinely more sophisticated diagnostic thinking. The operational response is a $500 million Market Access and Connectivity Project led by the Ministry of Roads and Highways — the same large, sovereign-led, government-implemented, sovereign-guaranteed instrument that produced the 27-year record. The Sub-Saharan transport portfolio it joins returns 10.8 percent Satisfactory across 65 projects and $11.2 billion, with 96 percent of resources below the S+ threshold. Ghana’s disbursement ratio collapsed to 2.81 percent in FY2026. Diagnostic learning has not been matched by operational learning.
2020 versus 2026: What Changed, What Was Inherited
Measured against the document it replaces, the strategy’s genuine change is the organizing principle, not the diagnosis. It states plainly that it “builds on the conceptual framework… developed for the 2020–2025 WBG FCV Strategy” (p.21). The diagnosis is preserved; the frame around it has shifted from the conflict spectrum to employment — and the delivery apparatus has not shifted at all.
| Dimension | 2020–2025 Strategy | 2026–2030 Strategy |
|---|---|---|
| Organizing logic | Conflict spectrum: prevent, stay engaged, transition, mitigate spillovers | Jobs agenda: jobs as the issue on which the WBG can contribute most |
| Core structure | Four pillars + Four Ps; 23 operational measures | Four strategic shifts; 24 key actions; 10 institutional outcomes |
| Classification | Backward-looking FCS list (prior-year CPIA + fatalities) | Forward-looking FCV typology (genuine advance) |
| Delivery apparatus | RRAs; FCV Envelope; CPF/ABPE cycle; TPI; IDA allocation framework | Same — carried over intact; TPI expanded to NGOs |
| Accountability | Annual reporting; MTR; IEG evaluation | Identical architecture; document-content indicators |
The new classification is the clearest advance — but its forward-looking element is removed from public view. The public “FCV List” remains keyed to violence already materialised (subnational events / fatalities, p.23), while the genuinely forward-looking “countries at risk” identification is held confidential to avoid a “self-fulfilling prophecy” (p.25). The publicly accountable artifact stays substantially backward-looking; the forward-looking apparatus sits inside the confidential Enterprise Risk Committee process, beyond external scrutiny.
The document is unusually candid about its predecessor — and that candour is the opening. It concedes that the 2020 design “lacked key components for translating aspirations into operational outcomes,” that portfolios “still show limited adaptation,” that strategies “rarely track outcomes related to fragility,” and that the Bank “did not meet expectations of impact when engaging with the private sector” (p.19) — and then leaves each concession substantially unaddressed in its operational design.
What Would Change: The Bank Already Knows, Where It Succeeds
The portfolio is not uniformly zero, and the exceptions are legible. The same dataset that produces the Zero Club also shows where the Bank escapes it — and the escape conditions are consistent across very different countries.
| Where the Bank escapes | What explains it |
|---|---|
| Rwanda — 94% transport, 96% energy, 75% education | State discipline; Imihigo performance contracts; governance established before financing scaled |
| Somalia — 89% MTI, in an acute-crisis setting | External / third-party implementation; bounded, deliverable objectives |
| Niger — 100% Water, against 0% MTI ($1.65bn) | Focused infrastructure with single-institution delivery vs. broad DPF conditionality — same country |
| Cameroon — 80% transport, against 0% health & education | Roads Fund provides single-institution discipline; cross-ministry sectors do not |
Across every escape case the conditions are the same: focused objectives, accountability at the delivery level, and design matched to demonstrated capacity rather than to ambition. The Ghana study reaches the same conclusion from the failure side — build enabling systems rather than transformation projects; radical simplification; geographic concentration; implementation-readiness thresholds before large operations; mandatory lessons-learned gates; measure employment, firm creation, and productivity; finance continuity rather than episodes. None of these is operationalised as a gate in the 2026 Strategy. The differentiated approach gestures toward selectivity and TPI expansion gestures toward delivery-level implementation, but neither is made a condition on jobs lending — and the strategy explicitly forecloses binding conditionality (p.28).
What We Propose: Seven Recommendations
The recommendations are institutional, not strategic. They do not ask for another revision of the theme — the theme is sound. They target the payoff structure, the only level at which the delivery record changes. They are listed in priority order, with what each requires. The first four can be set in motion at strategy launch and in IDA21’s first year; the last three reach the structural parameters that only the Governors can alter.
| # | Recommendation | Requires |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Restore independent quality assurance at appraisal. An independent review function, external to the preparing unit, with authority to flag inadequately designed projects and prevent Board presentation. QAG was disbanded in 2014 and never replaced; a hard QAE threshold below which projects cannot proceed is the minimum version. | Board directive |
| 2 | Declare the delivery baseline and a measurable jobs target. Declare the 74% below-Satisfactory FCS rate as the baseline, and adopt at launch an employment / firm-creation / productivity metric for the jobs agenda. A jobs strategy without a jobs metric repeats the Ghana failure at institutional scale. | Management |
| 3 | Make jobs lending pass a design-to-capacity gate. Require every FCS jobs operation to meet the conditions the Bank already demonstrates where it succeeds — focused objectives, delivery-level accountability (including TPI where government capacity is absent), design matched to demonstrated capacity. Operations that cannot meet the gate are redesigned, not approved. | Management / Board |
| 4 | Make PforR the presumptive FCS instrument. PforR achieves 61.1% S+ in Africa and 65.4% QAE-Satisfactory because its structure forces measurable objectives and verified results before disbursement. DPF and IPF should require specific justification for use in FCS, not the reverse. | Management |
| 5 | Link career outcomes to IEG outcome ratings. Country Director appointment and promotion criteria should incorporate IEG outcome ratings from previous tenures — targeting the MTI career pipeline that enforces the approval culture, without a governance restructuring. | Board directive |
| 6 | Implement the Zedillo Commission’s 2009 Board-governance recommendation. A non-resident Board that approves strategy and delegates project approval to management can scrutinise outcomes without implicating prior approvals. The co-approval architecture is why the Board cannot hold management accountable for the aggregate record. | Governors only |
| 7 | Introduce outcome-linked pricing on FCS operations. Service-charge adjustments where IEG documents below-Satisfactory outcomes attributable primarily to Bank design decisions — giving the institution a financial stake in whether its FCS operations work for the first time in 82 years. Targets the sovereign guarantee that decouples institutional payoff from outcomes. | Governors only |
Series Context
The Zero Club — Cross-Sector Synthesis
43 countries, 14 Global Practices, 419 projects, $34.5bn, zero Satisfactory. Every jobs Global Practice the strategy relies on appears in it. The outcome the jobs agenda inherits.
Ghana: FCI and the Jobs Agenda
14 projects, $615M, 27 years, zero Satisfactory. The jobs machine that did not create — or measure — jobs. The emblem of the delivery gap the strategy does not close.
Quality at Entry in IDA
The recovery rate from poor design was 10.7% in the 1980s. It is 0.0% today. Once a poorly designed project is approved, failure is near-certain. The strategy contains no mechanism that prevents approval.
Why the System Does Not Learn
The approval culture is a Nash equilibrium. Reforms within the existing payoff structure are absorbed. The 2026 Strategy is what that equilibrium produces under reform pressure. Only Governors can change the parameters.
| Companion paper | Scope | S+ Rate | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zero Club — Cross-Sector Synthesis | $34.5bn, 43 countries, 14 GPs | 0% | Published |
| Ghana: FCI and the Jobs Agenda | $615M, 14 projects, 27 years | 0% | Published |
| The Transport Record | $11.2bn, 65 projects | 10.8% | Published |
| The FCI Sector Record | $4.4bn, 67 projects | 36% | Published |
| Sound Strategy, Broken Platform (this assessment) | FCV Strategy 2026–2030 | FCS: 74% below S+ | This paper |
The strategy is sound. The platform is not. The diagnosis is correct, the classification is better, and the candour about the predecessor is real. But the strategy makes jobs its organizing principle and assigns delivery to the Global Practices with the weakest record — in the countries the strategy is for — and adopts that agenda without a jobs metric. It inherits the 2020 delivery apparatus intact and relocates accountability from outcome rates to whether country strategies use the right words.
The Bank already knows what delivery requires, because it is what separates the cases where it succeeds from the Zero Club: focused objectives, accountability at the delivery level, and design matched to demonstrated capacity. The strategy declines to make any of it a condition on jobs lending, and explicitly forecloses binding conditionality. The reforms that would change this target the payoff structure — an independent quality gate at appraisal, a declared baseline with a measurable jobs target, a design-to-capacity gate on jobs lending, and outcome-linked incentives.
None of these can be implemented by management, whose dominant strategy is to preserve the equilibrium, nor by a Board that has co-approved every project in the record. They require Governors — the only actors whose payoffs are not defined by the approval culture they are being asked to disrupt. A third generation of sound analysis applied to the same unreformed delivery machinery will produce a third generation of the same results.