Spring Meetings 2026 · April 13–18, Washington D.C. · MDB Reform Platform
Seven Questions the Spring Meetings Should Answer But Won’t
Seven questions on performance, accountability, and the reform agenda the World Bank and IMF have been postponing for thirty-five years
This week, finance ministers and central bank governors from 190 countries gather in Washington for the Spring Meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The official agenda focuses on global growth, the Middle East war shock, debt sustainability, and private sector mobilisation. These are real issues. But alongside them runs a parallel agenda that almost never gets discussed in the formal meeting rooms — the question of whether these two institutions, which together deploy roughly $100 billion a year, actually deliver what they promise to the people they are supposed to serve.
The evidence says the answer is often no. This brief sets out five questions the Spring Meetings should be asked to address — in plain language, for anyone who has ever wondered where the money goes.
Question 1: Why Does Only One in Three World Bank Projects Succeed — and Who Is Accountable?
The World Bank’s own evaluation office — the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) — rates every completed project as Satisfactory or not. The results, tracked over five decades, tell a story the institution has never fully reckoned with.
What happened? The World Bank built a culture that rewards approving loans over delivering results. Task managers are promoted for getting projects through the Board, not for what happens afterwards. When a project fails, the country repays the loan regardless. The Bank earns its fee regardless. No one at the institution is held to account for the outcome. The Wappenhans Report named this “approval culture” in 1992. Thirty-four years and multiple strategy cycles later, IEG’s own data confirms the same structural pattern.
The partial recovery from 24% to around 40% is real — but it is fragile, and 40% is still a failure rate that no private organisation would survive. The question for this week’s meetings: what specific, measurable internal accountability mechanism exists for projects that go wrong? Not a committee. Not a review. An actual consequence, for an actual person, when $100 million is lent and delivered below standard.
Question 2: The IMF Lends $170 Billion and Rates Nothing. How Does It Know If It Works?
The World Bank at least measures its results — imperfectly, but systematically. Every completed project gets an IEG rating. The IMF does not do this at all. The Fund’s evaluation office, the IEO, produces thematic reports on topics like pandemic response or exchange rate policy. These are valuable. But the IEO does not rate individual country programmes. It does not tell you whether the $3.4 billion lent to Nigeria in 2020 delivered the outcomes it was supposed to. It does not produce a systematic answer to the question: of all the programmes the Fund has run over the past decade, what share worked?
You cannot fix what you do not measure. The IMF has been operating for 81 years without a project rating system. The Spring Meetings are a good time to ask: why not?
Question 3: The Board Approves Every Project and Is Accountable for None of Them. That Is the Problem.
Both the World Bank and the IMF have resident Boards of Executive Directors who sit in Washington and vote on every significant decision — including individual loans. This sounds like governance. It is, in practice, the opposite.
When a Board approves a project, it becomes co-author of that project. It cannot then independently scrutinise the project’s failure without implicating its own prior endorsement. The result is a Board that is simultaneously too involved in operational decisions — approving individual loans worth tens of millions of dollars — and too detached from strategic accountability, because the approval process has already committed it to every project in the portfolio.
Every other major development institution — the Asian Development Bank, the New Development Bank, the European Investment Bank — operates with non-resident Boards that approve policy and strategy, and delegate project approval to management. Their governance is not worse for this. It is better, because the Board can scrutinise outcomes without having signed off on inputs.
The 2009 Zedillo Commission told the World Bank to make this change. The Bank did not. The Spring Meetings are a good time for shareholders to ask again: what is the Board actually for, if it approves everything and is accountable for nothing?
Question 4: Sovereign Immunity Means No One Ever Pays for Failure. That Is Not an Accident — It Is the Architecture.
When the World Bank or IMF lends to a government, the loan carries a sovereign guarantee. The country will repay regardless of what happens to the project. This sounds like financial prudence. For the institutions, it is. For the populations those projects are supposed to serve, it is a catastrophe of misaligned incentives.
If a $500 million World Bank health programme fails to deliver, Nigeria still repays $387.6 million over 38 years. The Bank earns its spread. The task manager who designed the programme gets their next posting. No one at the institution — not the task manager, not the Country Director, not the Vice President — faces a professional consequence for the failure. The only party that bears the cost is the country that borrowed the money to finance a programme that did not work.
World Bank Case Study · Nigeria
Saving One Million Lives PforR — $500 Million, Rated “Negligible” Efficiency
The Saving One Million Lives programme (P146583) was the world’s largest Programme-for-Results loan when it was approved in 2015. $500 million to improve maternal and child health outcomes across Nigeria’s states. IEG rated it Moderately Unsatisfactory. Efficiency was rated Negligible — meaning the Bank could not demonstrate that the money produced the health outcomes it was supposed to produce. The Bank’s own project completion report, written by the team that designed and supervised the programme, rated it Moderately Satisfactory throughout. Two different teams. Same projects. A 27-point rating gap. Nigeria will repay $387.6 million over 38 years. The task manager was not disciplined. There was no public institutional post-mortem.
Read the full SOML case study → Nigeria GP performance data →World Bank / IFC / MIGA Case Study · Nigeria Power Sector
Azura-Edo and the Take-or-Pay Trap — A $900 Million Lesson in Institutional Conflict
Nigeria has had over 230 grid collapses since 2010. The World Bank has spent over $1.15 billion on Nigeria’s energy sector. The Azura-Edo gas plant — a 461MW open-cycle facility in Edo State — illustrates precisely why the combination of sovereign guarantees and institutional fragmentation produces outcomes that serve the institutions better than the country.
On the Azura-Edo transaction, the World Bank Group was playing three roles simultaneously: the World Bank as policy adviser to the Nigerian government on power sector privatisation; IFC with $100 million in equity and debt in the project developer; and MIGA with $650 million in political risk guarantees against government non-payment. The IBRD additionally provided a $237 million Partial Risk Guarantee. These are not complementary roles. They are structurally conflicting ones: you cannot simultaneously advise a government on sector policy and hold a commercial stake in the project you are advising them to approve.
But the deeper problem is the take-or-pay contract structure. NBET — the Nigerian Bulk Electricity Trading Company — is contractually obligated to pay for power from Azura-Edo whether the national grid has the capacity to absorb it or not. Nigeria’s grid has collapsed over 230 times since privatisation began. The capacity to transmit the power that has been generated, contracted, and paid for does not exist at the scale the contracts assume. Nigeria is paying for electricity it cannot use, under contracts guaranteed by its sovereign credit, to projects the World Bank advised it to approve and in which the World Bank’s own private sector arm holds equity.
The Bank’s energy sector IEG rating for Nigeria (2000–2025): 25% Satisfactory across 4 evaluated projects. $0.47bn of $0.59bn committed went to below-Satisfactory outcomes — 79.8%.
Read the full Nigeria Power Sector analysis →IMF Case Study · Nigeria
$3.4 Billion COVID Emergency Loan — The Accountant General Was Convicted
In April 2020, the IMF approved its largest single COVID emergency loan: $3.4 billion to Nigeria, disbursed in one tranche, with governance commitments the Fund’s own evaluators later described as a checklist. Two years later, Nigeria’s Accountant General — the man who ran the institution through which the money flowed — was arrested for stealing the equivalent of $265 million from federal accounts. He was convicted in 2024. Nigeria repaid the IMF in full, on schedule, from July 2023 to April 2025, through the most painful phase of its structural adjustment programme. The IMF mission chief who designed the governance framework was promoted to Assistant Director. No retrospective audit was commissioned. The IMF’s own 2025 working paper on COVID emergency spending covers 50 countries. Nigeria is one line in the appendix.
Read the full Nigeria IMF analysis →Sovereign immunity and sovereign guarantees are not going to be abolished — they are fundamental to the architecture of multilateral lending. But outcome-linked debt relief, performance-linked staff incentives, and mandatory public retrospective audits for major failed programmes are all achievable within the current framework. None of them are on the Spring Meetings agenda.
Question 5: The Private Sector Arm of the World Bank Has an 11% Success Rate. Is That Acceptable?
The International Finance Corporation (IFC) is the World Bank’s private sector lending arm. Its mandate is to invest in private companies in developing countries — especially in the fragile, conflict-affected states where private capital is most scarce and most needed. In those states, IFC’s own evaluation office rates only 11 percent of its investments as achieving Satisfactory development outcomes.
Eleven percent. If this were a private investment fund, it would have been wound up years ago. Its investors would have lost their money and moved on. Instead, IFC is being asked to scale up its presence in fragile states as the centrepiece of the World Bank’s strategy for addressing extreme poverty.
Some of this poor performance reflects genuine difficulty — investing in fragile states is hard, markets are thin, regulatory frameworks are weak. But some of it reflects a structural problem: IFC has no strong incentive to be selective, because IDA — the World Bank’s concessional lending arm — provides subsidised capital through the Private Sector Window (PSW) that effectively backstops IFC’s losses. The PSW has deployed $6.18 billion since IDA18. Over 83 percent of it has gone through IFC-managed facilities, with no competitive allocation process. IFC both originates the deals and manages the subsidy that makes them possible. There is no independent verification that the subsidy is producing results that the market would not have produced anyway.
Question 6: Who Will Deliver the Jobs? Not the Six Bank Departments That Have a 70% Failure Rate in Fragile States.
The World Bank’s new strategy for fragile and conflict-affected countries is built around jobs. Private sector jobs, MSME growth, economic diversification. This is the right diagnosis: stable employment is the most powerful force for reducing fragility over the medium term.
The problem is delivery. The six World Bank Global Practices (GPs) most directly responsible for the jobs agenda — Finance, Transport, Energy, Agriculture, Water, Urban — collectively show below-Satisfactory IEG ratings on more than 70 percent of their projects in IDA and fragile-state countries over the past decade. The GP specifically responsible for the MSME and private sector development agenda (Finance, Competitiveness and Innovation) achieves 22.6 percent Satisfactory in IDA countries. Not 70 percent. Not 50 percent. Twenty-two.
The strategy is right. The delivery machine is broken. And the Spring Meetings agenda, which will discuss the strategy at length, will not spend a single session on the question of what happens internally at the World Bank when a project that costs $100 million and is supposed to create jobs, does not create jobs.
Question 7: The World Bank and IMF Have Been Doing the Same Work for 35 Years and Wasting Around $1 Billion a Year Doing It.
The IMF is headquartered at 700 19th Street NW, Washington D.C. The World Bank is at 1818 H Street NW, a short walk away. Both institutions employ large teams of economists. Both produce country economic assessments, macroeconomic forecasts, fiscal sustainability analyses, and public financial management capacity building programmes. In many countries, both are in the room at the same time, talking to the same Finance Ministry officials, sometimes giving contradictory advice.
This has been documented since at least 1989. There have been formal coordination agreements — the 1989 Concordat, the 1996 Concordat, multiple subsequent frameworks. None of them have materially reduced the overlap. Estimates of the annual cost of this duplication run to $750 million to $1.1 billion. The Spring Meetings happen every six months. The two institutions share a building during those meetings. The Managing Director and the President sit at the same table. And yet this problem — which has a straightforward structural solution involving clear division of mandates — has not been resolved in 35 years.
The Spring Meetings are a reasonable venue to ask: what will it take to actually fix this?
Read the full IMF–World Bank duplication analysis →What the Spring Meetings Will Actually Discuss
The official agenda for April 13–18 covers the global growth outlook (under pressure from the Middle East war shock), international cooperation and multilateralism (under pressure from everywhere), financial technology, and financing development in a higher-debt world. These are important topics. The IMF Managing Director’s curtain-raiser speech this week estimates that the Middle East conflict could generate an additional $20–50 billion in demand for IMF emergency financing.
More emergency financing. The same governance framework. The same checklist. The same institutional immunity from the outcomes it produces.
The Spring Meetings are the single moment each year when the shareholders of these two institutions — the finance ministers and central bank governors of 190 countries — have the leverage to ask hard questions. Most of them will not. The questions above are the ones they should.