MDB Reform is an independent platform for practitioner analysis and evidence-based advocacy focused on the World Bank Group, the IMF, and the regional development banks that shape development outcomes across the Global South.
It is built on more than two decades of direct field experience inside the institutions it examines — from Monrovia to Dar es Salaam to Addis Ababa to Freetown to Abuja. The analysis published here reflects what actually happens when development finance meets the ground, and what the gap between institutional design and institutional reality looks like from inside.
Why this platform exists
The multilateral development banks were architected in a different century for different challenges. The World Bank was created to finance post-war reconstruction. The IMF was designed to manage balance of payments crises in a fixed exchange rate system. The regional development banks followed — each shaped by the development theories and geopolitical priorities of their founding decades.
Eight decades on, these institutions have expanded enormously in scale, mandate, and complexity. They now operate across climate finance, pandemic response, fragile state reconstruction, digital infrastructure, gender equity, and governance reform — a portfolio their founders would not recognise. That expansion has happened largely through accretion: new windows, new trust funds, new thematic frameworks layered onto institutional structures that were not designed for them.
The result is a system that is simultaneously indispensable and underperforming. IEG’s longitudinal data — the most rigorous independent record available — shows that the share of World Bank projects achieving satisfactory development outcomes has not improved since the 1960s. The Bank and the Fund now overlap substantially in their country engagement, their diagnostic instruments, and their policy advice, generating duplication that neither institution has adequately addressed. And the people who bear the cost of underperformance are, without exception, those the institutions exist to serve: the poorest and most vulnerable populations on the planet.
MDB Reform exists to engage with that structural problem seriously — and to make the case for reforms that would allow these institutions to deliver more effectively to the people they were built to serve.
Field experience
The analysis published here is grounded in a career that spans the IFC, the IMF, and the World Bank across Sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific, and Eastern Europe.
From 2003 to 2008, the work centred on Liberia’s post-conflict reconstruction — one of the most demanding PFM environments on the continent — while also covering Sudan, Tanzania, and the broader East Africa region. The Liberia posting produced the FM Training School, which received the Africa Region Award for Excellence in 2007, and direct engagement with GEMAP, the internationally supervised financial management arrangement that accompanied Liberia’s reconstruction period.
From 2005 to 2011, based in Dar es Salaam, the work extended across Tanzania and East Africa — including the PEFA 2007 Parastatals Assessment whose findings were presented to Tanzania’s entire budget support donor community, and the TANESCO PEFA analysis in 2008.
From 2011 to 2015, based in Addis Ababa, the focus was Ethiopia’s Protecting Basic Services programme — the largest subnational fiscal transfer system in Sub-Saharan Africa — and the IBEX rollout to over 800 woredas, one of the few IFMIS implementations on the continent that delivered functional systems at scale.
From 2015 to 2018, based in Freetown as Country Manager for Sierra Leone, the work covered post-Ebola recovery, governance reform, and institutional rebuilding in one of the world’s most fragile environments.
From 2019 to 2022, based in Abuja as Lead Governance Specialist for Nigeria, the work engaged with governance and PFM reform, the power sector’s structural failures, and accountability frameworks in Africa’s largest economy.
Earlier postings included the IFC’s South Pacific Project Facility in Sydney (1995–96) and an IMF assignment as PFM Adviser to the Ministry of Finance in Tirana, Albania (2001–02) — the latter during the critical post-communist fiscal reconstruction period.
About this platform
MDB Reform publishes long-form practitioner essays, empirical policy papers, and analytical commentaries. All work is source-disciplined and draws on primary documents — IEG evaluations, ICRs, audit reports, parliamentary records, and court filings — rather than secondary synthesis. The platform is independent, carries no institutional affiliation, and accepts no advertising or sponsored content. Its editorial position is reformist rather than critical: the argument throughout is that these institutions matter too much to their intended beneficiaries to be left unreformed.