The Strategy Is Right. The Delivery Platform Is Broken.

FCV Strategy Series  ·  Paper 1 of 6  ·  MDB Reform Platform

The Strategy Is Right. The Delivery Platform Is Broken.

Why the World Bank’s Refreshed FCV Strategy Will Not Work Without Institutional Reform

Parminder Brar  |  mdbreform.com  |  April 2026

Keywords: FCV Strategy · World Bank · IDA · Fragile States · Delivery · IEG · Institutional Reform · Spring Meetings 2026

The Strategy

The World Bank Group’s Refreshed FCV Strategy makes a sound analytical case. The concentration of extreme poverty in fragile and conflict-affected situations — projected to reach 60 percent of the world’s extreme poor by 2030 — is correctly identified. The three pillars of security, justice, and jobs correctly map the interdependencies that individual sector strategies consistently underperform by ignoring. The four strategic shifts — anticipate fragility earlier, differentiate engagement by FCS type, mobilise the full WBG for jobs, and enhance the operational toolkit — are directionally rational.

Private sector development and MSME growth are the correct engines for employment in FCV contexts. Jobs provided by private employers are more durable than those funded by public investment. The Minerals and Metals Compact, AgriConnect, and M300 are plausible instruments. The new FCV classification framework — distinguishing prevention, high-intensity conflict, and turnaround settings — is a genuine advance over blunt FCS designation.

The question is not whether the strategy has the right priorities. Jobs and private sector development have been central to WBG FCV strategy for over a decade. The question is whether the Bank’s institutional machinery can deliver these priorities at scale in the settings where they are most needed.

The Delivery Record

Between FY2015 and FY2025, IDA-eligible countries received $103.3 billion in World Bank commitments across 12,434 IEG-evaluated projects. Of this, $70.0 billion — 67 percent — was committed to projects that did not achieve Satisfactory or better IEG outcome ratings. In FCS countries specifically: $29.1bn of $39.5bn, or 68 percent, fell below Satisfactory. In the six Global Practices most central to the jobs agenda: $33.6bn of $49.6bn, or 74 percent, below the threshold.

These figures use the Satisfactory or above threshold — not the World Bank’s institutional benchmark of Moderately Satisfactory. The distinction matters. MS+ produces headline figures of 79–88 percent, approximately double the S+ rates shown here, because it treats partial achievement of objectives as an acceptable result. A project rated Moderately Satisfactory has, by definition, not been Satisfactory. The six-point scale was introduced in 1994 to add granularity, not to redefine success. Satisfactory was and remains the original pass/fail threshold.

This is not marginal underperformance. This is not attributable to the difficulty of the operating environment alone. The Wappenhans Report in 1992 identified what it called an ‘approval culture’ — a preoccupation with new lending at the expense of implementation quality, driven by institutional incentive structures that reward portfolio size over portfolio performance. Thirty-four years and multiple strategy cycles later, the IEG RAP series documents the same structural pattern.

What This Series Documents

This is the first of six papers prepared as a response to the World Bank’s public consultation on its Refreshed FCV Strategy (Phase II, February 2026). The analysis is based exclusively on publicly available World Bank data: the IEG ICRR-PPAR evaluation database matched to the World Bank Projects Database at 99.97 percent coverage. No confidential or internal data have been used.

The six papers address: the IDA delivery record across instruments and regions (Paper 2); the four root causes of persistent underperformance and the accountability architecture that sustains them (Paper 3); IFC’s private sector record in FCS markets (Paper 4); IDA21 — what it advances and where structural gaps remain (Paper 5); and eight consolidated recommendations in priority order (Paper 6).

This paper is part of a six-paper series submitted as a public comment to the World Bank’s Phase II consultation on its Refreshed FCV Strategy (February 2026). The analysis is based on the IEG ICRR-PPAR Evaluation Database matched to the World Bank Projects Database, deduplicated to 7,774 unique projects (PPAR preferred over ICRR where both exist). IDA+Blend subset: 1,358 projects, FY2015–2025. S+ = Satisfactory or Highly Satisfactory only. All data publicly available. Dataset: 10.5281/zenodo.19352303

Parminder Brar is the founder of mdbreform.com and a former World Bank Country Manager and Lead Governance Specialist. He worked in four field postings in FCV countries in Africa between 2003 and 2023 and participated in over 600 operational missions.