Open Letter · Spring Meetings 2026 · Day 4 · April 16, 2026
An Open Letter to Ajay Banga, President of the World Bank Group
The FCV Strategy Is Right. The Delivery Machine Is Not. On the Approval Culture, the Six Global Practices, and the Incentive Architecture That Produces These Outcomes.
Dear President Banga,
In an interview with Reuters published on April 13, you described what you called the defining challenge of this Spring Meetings: 1.2 billion people will reach working age in developing countries over the next ten to fifteen years. At current trajectories, those economies will generate approximately 400 million jobs — leaving a deficit of 800 million. You said the implications of failing to close that gap, in terms of migration and instability, would be severe. You are right. This letter takes that challenge seriously. It asks whether the delivery machine the World Bank operates is capable of meeting it.
The argument here is not a disagreement with your agenda. It is an argument grounded in your own institution’s evaluation data — specifically, the IEG project ratings database, which records the outcome of every World Bank operation. That data raises a direct and specific question about the gap between the ambition you have articulated and the institutional capacity that currently exists to execute it.
The World Bank’s overall Satisfactory rating fell from 88 percent in the 1970s to 26 percent by 2010–14. It has partially recovered to around 41 percent today. That recovery is real. It is also incomplete: six projects in ten are still failing to achieve their stated objectives. In fragile and conflict-affected states — where 60 percent of the world’s extreme poor now live — the record is worse. The World Bank has committed $119.8 billion to Sub-Saharan Africa since 2015 — of which $89.1 billion went to projects rated below Satisfactory by IEG. In fragile and conflict-affected states globally, $58.2 billion has been committed to evaluated projects since 2015, of which $41.6 billion — 71 percent — was rated below Satisfactory. The S rate is below 30 percent on both measures.
The six Global Practices most directly responsible for private sector development and job creation — Finance, Competitiveness and Innovation; Macroeconomics, Trade and Investment; Agriculture and Food; Energy and Extractives; Transport; and Urban, Resilience and Land — have Satisfactory ratings in fragile and conflict-affected states that range from 13.5 percent to 36.7 percent. The worst performer is Macroeconomics, Trade and Investment — the practice most directly responsible for the policy environment in which jobs are created — at 13.5 percent in FCS countries and 18.5 percent globally. Transport, which builds the infrastructure on which supply chains and employment depend, is at 14.9 percent in FCS. Finance and Competitiveness, which is meant to unlock private sector investment, is at 21.3 percent in FCS. These are not peripheral practices. They are the six units whose work most directly determines whether a country can generate employment, attract investment, and grow its way out of fragility. The table below sets out the full picture, including Education and Health for context.
The FCV Strategy, published in 2020, correctly identifies the binding constraints: elite capture, security sector dysfunction, weak state legitimacy, and the absence of the basic institutional plumbing that private investment requires. The strategy is analytically sound. The delivery record is not. The question this letter asks is not about the strategy. It is about the incentive architecture that produces these outcomes despite the strategy — and what specifically you are doing to change it.
This week at the Spring Meetings, the World Bank launched the Human Capital Index Plus — an impressive tool that tracks human capital accumulation from birth to age 65, identifies gaps in health, education, and labour market participation, and shows what is achievable when policy gets it right. The gender gap finding alone is striking: closing gaps in labour force participation could raise women’s productivity by approximately 20 percent. The tool is right about the problem. The data it surfaces is exactly the kind of evidence-based framing that development policy needs.
The question the HCI+ cannot answer — and that IEG’s evaluation record does — is whether the interventions the Bank funds to close those gaps actually work in the environments where the gaps are largest. Education projects in fragile states: 33 percent Satisfactory. Health projects in fragile states: 35 percent Satisfactory. The index identifies the gap. The delivery record is the harder number. Both deserve the same rigour.
The Macroeconomics, Trade and Investment practice deserves particular attention here because it is the unit that manages the Bank’s Development Policy Operations — the budget support instruments that account for a substantial share of total IDA disbursements. DPOs are the Bank’s primary mechanism for promoting the policy and regulatory reforms that President Banga’s Reuters interview identified as central to the jobs agenda: permits, anti-corruption, labour law, land law, business environment, trade systems. MTI’s overall global Satisfactory rate is 18.5 percent — the lowest of all eight practices in this analysis. In FCS countries it is 13.5 percent.
The DPO instrument specifically tells a starker story. Across 681 evaluated DPF operations globally since 2015, the Satisfactory rate is 27.5 percent — $88.0 billion of $145.6 billion committed went to operations rated below standard. In FCS countries, where the policy reform agenda is hardest and most consequential, the DPF Satisfactory rate is 13.0 percent across 108 operations — $8.5 billion of $12.2 billion below standard. MTI-managed DPFs specifically: 18.2 percent Satisfactory globally, 13.3 percent in FCS, $60.6 billion of $87.0 billion below standard globally. This platform’s analysis of the DPO instrument — available at Policy Without Performance — documents how the instrument has been used to record reform commitments that are not implemented and cannot be verified. The practice and the instrument responsible for the policy reforms President Banga described in his Reuters interview are the lowest-performing practice and instrument in the Bank’s portfolio.
The Wappenhans Report identified the approval culture in 1992. It documented that the Bank’s internal incentive structure rewarded getting projects to the Board, not ensuring they delivered. Task managers were promoted for approvals, not outcomes. When projects failed, countries repaid their loans regardless. The institution earned its fees regardless. Wappenhans called this a portfolio problem of major proportions. That was 34 years ago. IEG’s evaluation data confirms the same structural pattern today.
The FCV Strategy names the problem precisely: the Bank cannot deliver in fragile states with the same instruments, incentives, and risk appetite it applies to stable middle-income countries. Fragile states require longer engagement, higher tolerance for failure, genuine field presence, and an accountability system that distinguishes between projects that failed because the context was impossible and projects that failed because the design was wrong. The Bank has none of these structural features at scale. What it has is a rating system that rated six projects in ten below standard while the institutions that designed and approved them moved on to the next posting.
This letter asks five questions about the Bank’s jobs agenda and the FCV delivery record.
The Reuters interview also cited the private sector agenda: IFC, the PSW, blended finance as the mechanism for mobilising capital where the Bank alone cannot go. This is the right instinct. But IEG has documented IFC’s Satisfactory rate in fragile and conflict-affected states at 11 percent — the lowest of any arm of the World Bank Group, in the environments where the private sector mobilisation case is strongest. The IDA Private Sector Window was designed to go where the private sector would not. The additionality question — whether the PSW displaces IFC’s own capital or supplements it — has not been independently assessed by IEG. Before IDA21 resources are deployed through IFC-managed facilities at scale, that assessment is a governance prerequisite, not an optional review.
The jobs will not come from Washington. They will come from the countries that borrow from this institution — if the conditions are right, if the institutional plumbing works, if the Bank builds genuine field presence rather than rotating task managers through Abuja and Freetown and Islamabad on short-term postings. The evidence says the Bank is not consistently building those conditions. The question is whether the will to change the system — not the strategy, the incentive structure, the accountability architecture — exists in this building this week.
Respectfully,
Parminder Brar
Founder, mdbreform.com
Former World Bank Country Manager and Lead Governance Specialist
April 16, 2026
The FCV Strategy series — six papers on the delivery record in fragile states: FCV Strategy Analysis
The IDA Private Sector Window analysis: Rethinking the PSW
The Nigeria power sector case: How Not to Do PPPs in Africa
The Kofi in Nigeria series — what development looks like from the ground: Kofi in Nigeria
The seven questions for the Spring Meetings: Spring Meetings 2026 Brief