Accountability in Development Finance
When a World Bank project enters design with weak quality at entry, the probability it will be rated Satisfactory or above at closing is 5.4 percent. When both design quality and monitoring are strong, that figure is 73 percent. The gap between those two numbers is not a performance finding. It is a governance finding.
The platform’s centrepiece narrative follows a fictional Ghanaian boy through the headquarters of six multilateral institutions. Each narrative is paired with an analytical note grounded in IEG data. The World Bank is a cruise ship that approves everything and accounts for nothing. The IMF is two battleships — one that disburses at scale, one that teaches fiscal discipline, with no mechanism connecting them. The IFC is a palace casino.
Read Paper →The World Bank’s Board of Executive Directors approved every one of the 13,273 IEG-rated operations in our dataset. Fifty-three percent failed to reach Satisfactory. The Board’s $84 million annual cost makes it the single largest line item in the institutional governance budget. Three structural fixes proposed: delegate routine project approval, create a formal annual S+ performance review, require IEG to brief the Board before Management.
Read Paper →A 47-minute essay on what Samuel Sitta and Harrison Mwakyembe achieved in Tanzania’s Parliament in 2006–2008 — and what it cost them. The most-read piece on the platform. About accountability in the precise sense: what happens when someone with institutional standing decides to use it.
Read Paper →Six country studies asking the same question: does the World Bank learn from project failure? Nigeria Water: 34 years, $1.8bn, 0.4% Satisfactory. Angola DPF: 24 years, $2.2bn, 0% Satisfactory, the same lesson recorded three times. South Africa Eskom: $9.1bn, Moderately Unsatisfactory. Ghana FCI: $615M, 0% Satisfactory. DRC: 49 projects, $6.7bn, 6.1% Satisfactory. DRC Inga: 40 years, the dam still does not generate.
Read Paper →Three sectors in Sub-Saharan Africa where no country in the evaluated portfolio achieved a Satisfactory outcome. MTI: 14 countries, 99 projects, $10.4bn. Health: 14 countries, 55 projects, $3.0bn. Transport: the foundational sector that has never held. These are not outliers. They are the system.
Read Paper →Two papers. The game theory paper models the equilibrium that makes reform irrational for every individual actor. The MTI power architecture paper documents how one Global Practice manages $26.9bn and delivers Satisfactory outcomes 11.7% of the time — and why that concentration persists across successive reform cycles.
Read Paper →46 assessments, 32 countries, 2016–2025. Four in five African countries score D or D+ on external audit — Schick’s foundational accountability control. The PEFA Secretariat has the data. It has not used it to reorder priorities.
Read Paper →April brings the Spring Meetings. We will publish sector-by-sector delivery records for every major World Bank portfolio in Sub-Saharan Africa — and open letters to the institutions that will be presenting those portfolios as successes.
About the Monitor
The MDB Reform Monitor is a monthly publication of MDB Reform Advisory. Each issue synthesises the platform’s analytical output for that month into a single governing finding, a set of key papers, and a cumulative argument about why the multilateral development banking system is not delivering at the scale its resources and mandate require.
Written for Executive Directors, donor government officials, parliamentary oversight bodies, investigative journalists, and researchers who follow MDB governance. All underlying papers at mdbreform.com/navigation. All datasets at mdbreform.com/data. Correspondence: pbrar@mdbreform.com.
Subscribe to the Monitor →