The FCI Record
Finance, Competitiveness and Innovation · April 2026 · mdbreform.com
$4.4 Billion Committed to FCI in Africa. 64% of Committed Resources Below Satisfactory.
The Jobs Machine That Does Not Create Jobs — The Global Practice Mandated to Create Jobs. The Record That Says It Cannot.
Parminder Brar · Former World Bank Country Manager and Lead Governance Specialist · mdbreform.com · April 2026
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| 36% S+ by commitment |
$2.9bn Below Satisfactory in a decade |
0% DPF S+ rate — five projects, $255M |
20.5% Non-FCS count S+ — worse than FCS |
The World Bank’s Finance, Competitiveness and Innovation Global Practice is the institutional vehicle for the Bank’s jobs and private sector development agenda in Africa. It designs growth pole projects, SME credit lines, investment climate reforms, housing finance programmes, trade facilitation operations, and PPP transactions. It is the GP that is supposed to turn the Bank’s jobs rhetoric into employment on the ground.
67 evaluated projects, $4.4 billion committed. By project count, 17 of 67 achieved Satisfactory — 25.4 percent. By commitment, $1.6 billion of $4.4 billion went to Satisfactory projects — 35.5 percent. The commitment-weighted rate is unusually higher than the count rate because two large Nigerian successes (Development Finance Project $500M, Kaduna Economic Transformation $350M) pull the dollar figure up. By either metric, the majority of resources went to below-Satisfactory outcomes. The global FCI rate is 39.8 percent. Africa underperforms by 14 percentage points.
The Projects Named After the Jobs Agenda — And Failed
The Ethiopia Competitiveness and Job Creation Project ($250 million) was rated Moderately Unsatisfactory. The Nigeria Growth and Employment Project ($160 million) was rated Moderately Unsatisfactory. The Nigeria Housing Finance Development Program ($300 million) was rated Moderately Unsatisfactory. The Nigeria Public/Private Partnership Program ($115 million) was rated Highly Unsatisfactory. The South Africa Land Bank Financial Intermediation ($93 million) was rated Highly Unsatisfactory. The Burkina Faso Bagré Growth Pole ($115 million) was rated Moderately Unsatisfactory. Combined: $1.033 billion committed to projects explicitly designed to create jobs, build competitive markets, or catalyse private investment. Every one rated MU or worse. Not a single Satisfactory outcome. The Bank’s jobs agenda is not failing at the margins. It is failing at the centre — in the projects that carry the agenda’s name.
The FCS Inversion
Non-FCS performance (20.5 percent Satisfactory by count) is worse than FCS (34.8 percent). The GP mandated to build competitive markets performs worse in stable economies than in fragile states. Ghana: 4 projects, zero Satisfactory, $112 million. Kenya: 2 projects, zero Satisfactory, $127 million. Ethiopia: 2 projects, zero Satisfactory, $503 million. Nine countries with two or more FCI projects returned zero percent Satisfactory on a combined $1.2 billion. The FCS outperformance is driven by bounded projects — SME development in DRC ($100M, Highly Satisfactory), emergency business support in Burundi. The same pattern as in health: bounded objectives succeed; system-level transformation fails.
The Jobs Silence
Jobs are mentioned in only 12 percent of FCI project lessons. Employment outcomes in 9 percent. The GP whose mandate is literally competitiveness and job creation barely discusses either in its own evaluations. IEG’s own 2024 evaluation of IDA’s jobs strategy found that DPF prior actions on jobs had impact in only one-third of validated operations. The promises of improved results measurement remain unfulfilled. The jobs agenda commands approximately 8 percent of the IDA commitment amount — a sideshow dressed as a centrepiece.
Jobs at the Spring and Annual Meetings
Job creation was the flagship theme of the 2025 Spring Meetings — “Jobs: The Path to Prosperity” — with the Bank’s leadership, Michelle Bachelet, and Tharman Shanmugaratnam on stage. It was the central theme of the 2025 Annual Meetings — “Jobs, Agriculture, and Economic Growth” — where AgriConnect was launched and the Bank described “a major shift from funding single projects to supporting entire economic ecosystems to create jobs.” The Bank spent an entire year making jobs the headline. The GP mandated to deliver that agenda returned 25.4 percent Satisfactory by count and 36 percent by commitment. DPF — the instrument supposed to unlock investment climate reform — returned zero percent Satisfactory across five projects and $255 million. The Bank’s jobs agenda is a promise built on a delivery model that the Bank’s own evaluator says is not working.
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