The Zero Club (Part 9) · MTI in Africa · MDB Reform Platform
MTI in Africa: 14 Countries, 99 Projects, $10.4 Billion Committed, Zero Satisfactory
The Zero Club is not 14 separate country failures. It is one institutional pattern repeated 99 times. The instrument rewards legal compliance over functional change. The career architecture protects the GP that produces it. The CPIA confirms no institutional improvement. The PEFA confirms the form-function split. The pipeline continues because no institutional mechanism connects MTI’s outcome performance to its lending authority. Both sides are individually rational. Neither has an incentive to exit. The result is a Nash equilibrium that has persisted across 14 countries for up to 28 years.
Why MTI
The Macroeconomics, Trade and Investment Global Practice is the worst-performing GP in Africa by project count. Across 143 IEG-evaluated MTI projects closing between FY2015 and FY2025 in Sub-Saharan Africa, 18 were rated Satisfactory or Highly Satisfactory — a project-count S+ rate of 12.6 percent. Social Protection achieves 63.9 percent. Urban achieves 48.7 percent. Agriculture achieves 36.3 percent. A GP that succeeds one time in eight while managing the second-largest commitment volume in Africa warrants dedicated examination.
The Aggregate Record
MTI committed $41.8 billion across 389 IEG-evaluated projects in Sub-Saharan Africa. The S+ rate by commitment is 23.6 percent — fewer than one dollar in four reached Satisfactory outcomes. In the 2010s — the decade of maximum DPF scaling — the rate was 3 percent on $13 billion. Over the same period, major sector GPs achieved S+ rates between 35 and 60 percent. MTI’s 3 percent is not marginal underperformance — it is an order-of-magnitude gap.
The Independent Test: CPIA and PEFA
CPIA
If MTI conditionality had produced genuine institutional change, that change should be visible in the Bank’s own annual CPIA. It is not. In Niger — 15 operations, $1.65bn — every MTI-targeted CPIA criterion deteriorated between 2006 and 2024: Fiscal Policy -0.5, Debt Policy -0.5, Financial Sector -1.0, Transparency -0.5. Across all 14 countries, the Transparency, Accountability and Corruption criterion deteriorated or stagnated in 8 of 13 countries with data.
PEFA: Schick’s Seven Foundational Indicators
Eleven of the 14 Zero Club countries have published PEFA assessments. Across these 11 countries, the Schick 7 average is 1.90 out of 4.0 — below the SSA average of 2.10. Five countries have repeat assessments enabling trend analysis:
| Schick 7 Indicator | Avg Change | Improved | Declined | Unchanged |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PI-01 Budget Reliability | +1.20 | 3 of 5 | 0 of 5 | 2 of 5 |
| PI-21 Cash Management | +0.40 | 3 of 5 | 2 of 5 | 0 of 5 |
| PI-27 Financial Data Integrity | +0.30 | 2 of 5 | 2 of 5 | 1 of 5 |
| PI-23 Payroll Controls | -0.10 | 1 of 5 | 1 of 5 | 3 of 5 |
| PI-24 Procurement | -0.10 | 1 of 5 | 2 of 5 | 2 of 5 |
| PI-29 Basic Accounting | -0.20 | 0 of 5 | 1 of 5 | 4 of 5 |
| PI-30 External Audit | -0.20 | 0 of 5 | 2 of 5 | 3 of 5 |
| ALL SCHICK 7 (35 obs) | +0.19 | 10 | 10 | 15 |
Open Budget Survey
The OBS — the only independent measure of budget participation — confirms from the demand side what PEFA confirms from the supply side. SSA scores 12 out of 100 on public participation. Seven countries including Niger provide zero formal participation mechanisms. The countries where $10.4 billion in DPF conditionality targeted fiscal reform have no citizen engagement in the budget process whatsoever.
The Six Failure Modes
| Failure Mode | Countries | Mechanism |
|---|---|---|
| Scaling without learning | Niger, DRC | Commitment grows, ratings don’t. Operations get larger, not better. |
| Oil-cushion immunity | Angola, Congo-Brazzaville | Resource revenues make conditionality non-binding. |
| Debt-service lending | Zambia | IEG PPAR 30498: “lending influenced by desire to keep Borrower current on debt.” |
| Political fragility + SOE capture | Madagascar, Togo | Transitions reverse reforms; SOEs resist restructuring. |
| Vested interest capture | Guinea, Gambia, Zimbabwe | Reforms enacted then stripped or reversed at legislative stage. |
| Federal-state tension | Nigeria | Sub-national DPOs constrained by federal policy. |
Why the Pipeline Never Stops
The supply side. The companion paper on institutional power architecture documents that approximately 50 percent of Country Director tenures in eight major Africa CMUs were held by macroeconomist-track individuals who allocate 1.5 to 2 times more of the IDA lending envelope to DPOs. The DPO is the fastest to prepare, the cheapest to supervise, and the most efficient at producing Finance Ministry relationships.
The demand side. A companion game theory analysis identifies a stable Nash equilibrium. The borrowing government’s dominant strategy is to accept every DPF regardless of whether the previous one achieved its objectives. IDA terms — 38-year maturities, 6-year grace periods, 0.75 percent service charges — mean the cost of accepting a failing DPF is near-zero. No rational Finance Minister rejects a $250 million IDA credit because the last one was rated MU. Isomorphic mimicry — signing letters, gazetting laws, creating committees — is the Finance Ministry’s rational dominant strategy.
The DPF Bifurcation
| DPF Category | Projects | Committed | S+ Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| MTI-managed DPFs (Africa) | 357 | $40.7bn | 23.8% |
| Sector-GP DPFs (Africa) | 301 | $25.7bn | 43.0% |
| MTI DPFs in Zero Club | 88 | $9.9bn | 0.0% |
| Sector DPFs in Zero Club | 47 | $2.0bn | 8.7% |
Note: 99 = all MTI projects in Zero Club countries (88 DPFs + 11 IPFs/TA). The DPF bifurcation table shows DPF operations only. Source: IEG ICRR/PPAR database, March 2026. Commitment-weighted.
Across all of Africa, sector-GP-managed DPFs outperform MTI-managed DPFs by 19.2 percentage points. Energy sector DPFs achieve 86.3%. Social Protection 53.3%. The instrument is the same. The variable is which GP manages it and how focused the design is. The Rwanda bifurcation — $1.36 billion in sector DPFs at 100% S+ versus $598 million in broad PRSGs at 0% — holds continent-wide.
The Niger Deep Dive
Niger is the most MTI-intensive Zero Club country: 15 operations, $1.65 billion, 28 years. The most recent operation — P175256, Building Institutions and Human Capital ($250M, MU) — illustrates the form-function gap at the operational level.
Six prior actions — all ministerial decrees or orders. SOE governance decrees. Public investment committee creation. Water code licensing. Teacher deployment criteria. TVET financing rules. Health education in schools. Every one is a stroke-of-the-pen measure.
Eight results indicators — four rated Negligible by IEG. SOE performance agreements: target 8, actual 1. Sanitation PPPs: target 4, actual 0 operational. Teacher deployment: target 0.9, actual 0.76 — deteriorated from the baseline. Schools with health education: no data provided.
The Benin Exception and Counterexamples
The paper does not argue that DPFs never work. Three counterexamples prove the instrument can deliver:
The finding is structural: broad MTI-managed macro-fiscal DPFs systematically underperform when institutional capability is weak and reform ownership is performative rather than functional. Focused sector DPFs with clear prior actions succeed — in the same countries, under the same governments, using the same instrument.
The Zero Club documents one of the most persistent and institutionally significant patterns of underperformance in the World Bank’s Africa portfolio. Fourteen countries, 99 projects, $10.4 billion committed, zero percent Satisfactory. The Bank’s own CPIA shows no aggregate institutional improvement. The PEFA shows the form-function split across all seven of Schick’s foundational indicators. The OBS confirms zero citizen participation. And the Bank’s own evaluator warns about “semi-automatic budget support.”
The DPO paper identified the mechanism: isomorphic mimicry driven by prior actions that reward legal compliance over functional change. The power architecture paper identified the institutional driver: a career pipeline that produces economist Country Directors who allocate disproportionate IDA resources to the instrument with the weakest outcomes. The game theory paper identified the equilibrium: both borrower and Bank are individually rational. Neither has an incentive to exit.
Until an institutional mechanism connects MTI’s outcome performance to its lending authority, the pattern documented here is likely to persist.
The Case Study Series
| # | Case | Commitment | S+ Rate | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Nigeria Water | $1.8bn | 0.4% | Published |
| 2 | Angola DPF | $2.2bn | 0% | Published |
| 3 | South Africa Energy (Eskom) | $9.13bn | — | Published |
| 4 | Ghana FCI | ~$500M | 0% | Published |
| 5 | DRC Portfolio | $6.7bn | 6.1% | Published |
| 6 | DRC Inga | $107M + $250M | — | Published |
| 7 | Somalia | ~$900M | 89% | Published |
| 8 | Rwanda | $4.6bn | 68.5% | Published |
| 9 | The Zero Club — MTI in Africa | $10.4bn | 0% | This paper |