MDB Results 2026: An Independent Assessment — Series Introduction
A Story for Children of All Ages
Kofi was seven years old when his parents took him to Washington DC.
His father worked in finance and had meetings at a place called the World Bank. Kofi did not know what a World Bank was but the name sounded important. He imagined a very large building with a great deal of money in it, possibly stacked in piles.
They got off the metro at a station called Farragut West and walked down a slope. Then Kofi stopped. Right there. On the road in front of him, to his utter shock and surprise, was a cruise ship parked on the road. Complete with its funnel and bow pointing to a small white house at the end of the street.
Not a small ship. A very large ship. A gleaming, curved, magnificent ship with glass soaring into the sky. Kofi looked at his father. His father was not surprised. This, apparently, was where the meetings were.
“Why is there a ship on the road?” Kofi asked.
“It’s a bank,” his father said.
Kofi looked at it again. It did not look like a bank. It looked like a ship. But he had learned that adults often called things by the wrong names and it was usually faster to just go along with it.
There was a queue to get in, which Kofi thought was exactly right for a ship. You always queued to board a ship. There were people in uniforms who checked bags and looked at passes and asked serious questions. Kofi’s bag had his water bottle and a packet of biscuits in it. The serious people looked at the biscuits and let him through.
Inside was the atrium.
Kofi had never seen anything like it. It went up and up and up. Light came from everywhere. Hundreds of people moved across the marble floor with great speed and purpose, their bags rolling behind them, their phones pressed to their ears. They spoke many languages. They wore very nice clothes. They were all going to very important meetings, Kofi could tell, because they all looked as if they were already slightly late for them.
“What are all these people doing?” Kofi asked.
“They work here,” his mother said.
“What do they do?”
“They help poor countries,” his mother said.
Kofi looked at the rushing, well-dressed people with their rolling bags and their important phones. He thought about this for a moment.
“Do the poor countries know they’re being helped?” he asked.
His mother said that was a very good question and took his hand and kept walking.
Kofi looked up at the atrium again — the soaring light, the marble, the space that went up and up and up.
“This would be a great place for a party,” he said.
“They do have parties,” his father said. “Twice a year. All the wise men from around the world come. They fill this atrium. They eat very well. They talk a great deal.”
“What do they talk about?” Kofi asked.
“They gossip,” his father said. “They are all very busy, you see. Too busy to follow what the money is actually achieving. So instead they talk about each other.”
Kofi considered this carefully.
“Do they talk about the results?” he asked.
His father smiled the smile of a man who worked in finance. “They talk,” he said, “about the next meeting.”
In the atrium, Kofi noticed a statue. It was small compared to everything else — easy to miss in the soaring space and the rush of important passengers. A child, about his age, leading a blind man with a stick.
The child in the statue looked, Kofi thought, like someone from one of the poor countries. He stopped to look at it. The passengers moved around him like a river around a small stone, barely adjusting their course, their eyes on their phones, their meetings waiting.
“Why does nobody look at the statue?” Kofi asked.
Nobody answered because everyone was in a meeting.
They went to the cafeteria for lunch and it was the most wonderful cafeteria Kofi had ever seen. Food from everywhere — rice and stew and flatbreads and things he had never tasted. He had three helpings of jollof rice and was very happy.
In the corner, his father mentioned, was a special dining room for special people where someone brought your food to you. Kofi asked if they could eat there.
“We are not special enough,” his father said.
“Who is special enough?” Kofi asked.
His father gestured vaguely at the upper floors where the captain lived, where the twenty-five wise men and women had their offices, where important decisions were made twice a week about which countries would receive money for their projects. They were very busy. They had three hundred decisions to make every year. They reviewed every project before the money went. It took most of their time.
“Do they check afterwards if it worked?” Kofi asked.
His father looked at him. “There are people who do that,” he said carefully.
“And what do they find?”
His father was quiet for a moment. He was a man who worked in finance and knew the numbers. “They find,” he said, “that it is more complicated than it looks.”
On the way out, Kofi stopped again at the statue.
The child was still leading the blind man. The passengers were still rushing past. The atrium was still soaring. Somewhere in the building the printing press was running, producing reports for the world. These reports kept a lot of these people busy. It cost the ship’s owners a billion dollars a year. Somewhere in the basement the gym was available. Somewhere on the top floor the captain could see, from his window, the emperor’s house just down the avenue.
Kofi looked at the child in the statue for a long time.
Then, because he was seven years old and had not yet learned not to ask questions, he asked one.
“Since they built this ship in 1944 — what have they actually done? What are the results?”
The child in the statue seemed to look back at him.
From somewhere in the building, something stirred. An eighty two year old genie, woken from a long sleep by a simple question.
Give me a week, said the genie. Every day I will tell you where these ships actually are. Not where the communiqués say. Not what the annual reports show. What the coordinates say when you read the independent evaluations they produced themselves.
The World Bank. The IMF. The IFC. The African Development Bank. The Asian Development Bank. The Inter-American Development Bank.
Six ships. Six days. One question.
Kofi picked up his water bottle. His father was already at the door.
The child in the statue had not moved. But Kofi could have sworn, as he turned to leave, that for just a moment — in the soaring light of the atrium, surrounded by the rush of important passengers on their way to important meetings — the child in the statue smiled.