Zero Accountability
Eleven Findings from the Spring Meetings — and the One Structural Reason None of Them Were Discussed
Parminder Brar | mdbreform.com | April 30, 2026
The Spring Meetings ended ten days ago. Mission 300 was announced. AgriConnect was launched. Water Forward was staged with Matt Damon. The Knowledge Bank was rebranded. The communiqués were filed. The Boards have returned to their twice-weekly approval rhythm.
Nothing has changed. This note explains why.
The Structural Argument
There is zero accountability at the multilateral development banks. Not weak accountability. Not insufficient accountability. Zero.
The reason is the sovereign guarantee. The World Bank lends under a guarantee from the borrowing government. Countries must repay whether a project succeeds or fails. The IMF lends with preferred creditor status. Countries must repay whether the money was stolen or spent. The guarantee decouples the institution’s financial health from its development performance. The Bank has never lost money on a sovereign loan. It has also never been held accountable for a failed one. These two facts are causally related.
This is not a management failure. It is a Nash equilibrium. The task team leader is promoted for approvals, not outcomes. The Country Director needs MTI goodwill for the next posting. The Board co-approves every loan and cannot scrutinise outcomes without implicating its own prior endorsement. The IMF deploys emergency financing, collects repayment, and classifies the evaluation. No single actor has the incentive to defect. Within-system reforms — strategies, scorecards, results frameworks — do not change the equilibrium. They are absorbed by it. Only the Governors can change the payoff structure. They have not done so in eighty years.
The game theory analysis published during the Spring Meetings documents precisely which reforms change these parameters — and which do not. → Why the System Does Not Learn: A Game Theory Analysis
The Capture
The equilibrium is sustained by a specific institutional architecture: the capture of the World Bank’s decision-making by macroeconomists whose primary instrument — Development Policy Financing — has failed by its own evaluator’s standards, with no accountability for the failure.
MTI — Macroeconomics, Trade and Investment — manages 54 percent of all evaluated DPF operations and delivers the weakest Satisfactory rate of any major Global Practice: 27.5 percent, down from 41 percent in 2005–09 to 17 percent in 2015–19. MTI’s DPF in Eastern and Southern Africa returns 17.4 percent Satisfactory — one in six. In fragile states, 21.1 percent. The instrument rewards legal compliance over functional institutional change: governments gazette laws, launch portals, and approve strategies to trigger disbursements while the underlying administrative capability remains absent or deteriorates. This is isomorphic mimicry at industrial scale. The SSA CPIA score has been flat at 3.1 for eighteen years. The SSA PEFA average sits at 2.2 out of 4.0, joint lowest globally. The DPF portfolio has produced neither the policy reforms it conditions on nor the institutional improvements it claims to catalyse.
The macroeconomists who designed these operations now occupy the top decision-making positions across the institution — Vice Presidencies, Regional Directorships, Country Directorships — without in-depth sectoral knowledge of the health, education, water, energy, and agriculture portfolios they oversee. This is not a recent development. MTI economists have maintained a vice-like grip on the top leadership positions in infrastructure, human development, and governance for decades. They decide how health money is spent without having run a clinic. They decide how transport money is allocated without having built a road. They decide how education money is structured without having managed a school system. The DPF instrument is their career vehicle. Its failure — 27.5 percent Satisfactory overall, 17 percent in Eastern and Southern Africa, zero percent in health, zero percent in FCI — has produced no institutional consequence for the people who designed it, approved it, or supervised it. Will they take responsibility for the performance of the sectors they now control? The IEG record for every major GP under their watch — transport at 10.8 percent, education at 21.4 percent, water at 24.5 percent, FCI at 25.4 percent, energy at 30.3 percent, health at 34.6 percent, agriculture at 35.7 percent — says the answer is no. That is what zero accountability looks like from the inside. → Policy Without Performance: The DPO Incentive Trap
The same macroeconomists sustain a second structural waste: the duplication between the Bank and the IMF. Both institutions maintain full macro-fiscal engagement architectures in the same borrowing countries. Both project fiscal deficits, model debt trajectories, design tax reform agendas, set conditionality on the same budget lines, dispatch technical assistance missions to the same ministries, and supervise reform implementation with the same officials. The cost — measured in wasted administrative spending, contradictory advice, and implementation paralysis — is conservatively $750 million to $1.1 billion per year. In Nigeria, contradictory signals on fuel subsidy reform persisted for six years while the fiscal cost reached ₦4.4 trillion. In Ghana, conflicting debt sustainability assessments between the Fund and the Bank allowed the government to defer action until the debt crisis materialised in 2022. Thirty-five years of concordats and collaboration frameworks have changed nothing at field level. The reason is not technical. It is that macro policy dialogue is the most prestigious work in both organisations. Neither will concede the territory. → The Cold War Across 19th Street
The Evidence: Eleven Findings
The following findings are drawn from over forty analyses published on this platform since March 2026. Every one is grounded in IEG evaluation data, IEO assessments, PEFA scores, or DPAD prior action records. Every dataset is publicly available at mdbreform.com/data.
1. IDA: 31 percent, not 91 percent. The IDA21 Deputies Report told 59 donor governments that IEG ratings show 91 percent satisfactory performance. The honest figure, using the original Satisfactory threshold the Bank established in 1960, is 31 percent. $117 billion of committed IDA resources over the past decade went to projects that did not achieve Satisfactory outcomes. The gap between 91 and 31 is not a methodological nuance. It is the governance mechanism that has shielded IDA’s delivery failure from accountability for four decades. → IDA at 65: The Performance Record
2. Africa: $89 billion below standard. The World Bank has committed $119.8 billion to Sub-Saharan Africa since 2015. Of this, $89.1 billion — 74 percent — went to projects rated below Satisfactory. Every dollar was approved by the Board. No Board member has been asked to account for the gap. → Open Letter to the Boards
3. IFC in fragile states: 11 percent Satisfactory. IFC’s development outcome rating in FCS collapsed to 11 percent Satisfactory in the CY2020–22 cohort. The Private Sector Window — $6.18 billion of IDA concessional capital designed to scale IFC’s FCS presence — did not produce a net increase in IFC commitments in eligible countries. Non-PSW IFC commitments actually fell. The PSW is replacing IFC’s own capital, not supplementing it. Additionality was realised in only 33 percent of FCS projects. That is a refund, not development finance. → IFC in Fragile States
4. The IMF: $170 billion without a scorecard. The IMF disbursed $170 billion in COVID emergency financing across 88 countries without fiduciary controls. Its own Legal Department subsequently documented governance failures across approximately 50 recipient countries, with budget losses of 20–30 percent. The $3.4 billion disbursement to Nigeria — the largest in Sub-Saharan Africa — flowed through an Accountant General who was convicted in 2024. The repayment was collected in full. The receipts were never checked. The IEO produced a generic evaluation that did not name a single country where funds were misappropriated. Then they covered it up. The IMF has never rated a single lending operation since its founding in 1944. Eighty-one years. Zero outcome ratings.
At the Spring Meetings 2026, Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva stated that the IMF has improved its procedures for emergency lending and that countries should expect better outcomes. She announced that a dozen more countries — most in Africa — will seek emergency financing in the wake of the current crisis, with near-term demand reaching $50 billion. The governance framework that will be applied is institutionally the same one that was applied in 2020. The question the Managing Director did not answer: what about the corruption documented in 50 countries under the last emergency disbursement? What about the officials sitting in jail — the Nigerian Accountant General convicted, public servants across the continent prosecuted — as a direct consequence of the failed and near-criminal procedures the IMF adopted when it disbursed $170 billion in the most irresponsible way in the institution’s history? What about the problems created in those 50 countries, as documented by the IMF’s own Legal Department? The procedures have been “improved.” The accountability for the damage caused by the old procedures — the stolen funds, the corrupted institutions, the people imprisoned — has not been established. The IMF collected full repayment. The countries bear the cost. The people who went to jail bear the cost. The IMF bears nothing. → Open Letter to the IMF
5. AFRITAC: twenty years of classified reports. The IMF’s five African regional technical assistance centres have operated for two decades. Their reports are classified. Their results do not appear in either CPIA scores or PEFA assessments. Missions increasingly target esoteric subjects — accrual accounting, climate budget tags, gender-disaggregated expenditure frameworks — while Schick’s seven foundational treasury controls remain broken across the continent. The reports are recycled because the results are recycled. → AFRITAC: Isomorphic Mimicry in Technical Assistance
6. Mission 300: big numbers, no reckoning. The Bank announced 300 million electricity connections by 2030. The target is impossible to achieve without acknowledging what the Bank has already done to the power sector. In Nigeria, the World Bank Group simultaneously served as policy adviser, IFC equity investor, and MIGA/IBRD guarantor in the same sector, the same country, the same transactions — a $900 million financial exposure across two projects that left the sector with a $1 billion financial deficit and take-or-pay contracts that force Nigeria to pay for power it cannot use while 2,638 MW of near-zero-cost hydropower is curtailed. The Bank turned from policy adviser to debt collector. Instead of turning lights on, the World Bank Group is turning lights off through the financial burden it has placed on the sector. Mission 300 does not reference this record. → Nigeria Power Sector: How Not to Do PPPs · The Energy Record
7. AgriConnect: another initiative without a baseline. The Bank launched AgriConnect — pledging to double agribusiness investment to $9 billion a year. The IEG record for Agriculture and Food in Africa: 98 evaluated projects since FY2015, 35.7 percent Satisfactory, $4.9 billion of $8.0 billion in committed resources below standard. Sustainability is cited as a constraint in 60 percent of IEG lessons. Inputs are delivered; gains do not persist. AgriConnect does not cite the IEG baseline, does not reference IEG’s own agriculture evaluation, and does not explain what will be different this time. Initiatives that do not begin with the failure record are designed to repeat it. → The Agriculture Record
8. Water Forward: noise on the stage. Water Forward was launched with Matt Damon at the Spring Meetings. The IEG record for the Water Global Practice in Africa: 53 evaluated projects since FY2015, 24.5 percent Satisfactory, $3.8 billion of $5.1 billion in committed resources below standard. Institutional sustainability, utility governance, and post-project maintenance are persistent failure points documented across multiple IEG evaluations. Celebrity endorsement does not substitute for outcome data. The water sector needs implementation reform, not a publicity campaign. → The Water Record
9. Education: $4.6 billion below standard. The Education Record documents $6.6 billion committed to 92 education projects in Africa, with 69 percent of committed resources going to projects rated below Satisfactory. By project count the rate is 35.9 percent — comparable to health and agriculture. By commitment it drops to 31 percent because the largest projects fail: Ethiopia ($575 million, 3 projects, zero Satisfactory), DRC ($550 million, 4 projects, zero Satisfactory). South Asia achieves 56.0 percent Satisfactory. The MS+ rate is 89.1 percent — the gap between the Bank’s headline and the honest bar is 53 percentage points. → The Education Record
10. The Board: approves everything, accountable for nothing. The Board has approved every World Bank loan since 1944. In eighty-two years it has never formally held management accountable for development outcomes. The Zedillo Commission identified the structural problem in 2009 and recommended a non-resident Board. Seventeen years later the resident Board costs $100 million per year. The AIIB operates for $5 million. The approval workload structurally crowds out the oversight function. A Board that approves 300 operations per year has no time to evaluate whether the previous 300 achieved their objectives. → Who Is Minding the Ship?
11. The Knowledge Bank: thousands of reports, no quality control. The World Bank produces thousands of analytical reports, policy notes, and technical papers every year. It brands itself a “Knowledge Bank.” In 2006, a panel of Nobel laureates — including Angus Deaton and Kenneth Arrow — reviewed the Bank’s research output and found systematic quality control failures: advocacy disguised as research, insufficient peer review, and a tendency to produce findings that supported predetermined lending positions. The panel’s recommendations were never implemented. Twenty years later the Knowledge Bank continues to produce volume without verification, recycling analytical frameworks across regions and sectors with minimal adaptation. The reports are not rated. Their recommendations are not tracked. Their impact on project design is not measured. The Knowledge Bank is a production line, not an accountability mechanism. → The Knowledge Bank
The Sector Record: Every Major GP Documented
The findings above are supported by a complete set of sector-level analyses covering every major Global Practice in Sub-Saharan Africa. Each paper draws on the same IEG Master Database (10,542 deduplicated rated projects, March 2026), applies the same Satisfactory threshold, and documents country-level, instrument-level, and annual performance. The full data is available at mdbreform.com/data. The sector records, in order of performance:
| Sector | Projects | Committed | S+ | Below S+ | Paper |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Transport | 65 | $11.2bn | 4% | 96% | The Foundation That Does Not Hold |
| Energy | 99 | $21.5bn | 15% | 85% | Mission 300 and the Energy Record |
| Water | 53 | $5.1bn | 25% | 75% | The Water Record |
| Health | 78 | $8.4bn | 29% | 71% | Health Works Without Accountability |
| Education | 92 | $6.6bn | 31% | 69% | The Education Record |
| FCI | 67 | $4.4bn | 36% | 64% | The Jobs Machine That Does Not Create Jobs |
| Agriculture | 98 | $8.0bn | 38% | 62% | AgriConnect and the Agriculture Record |
Not a single major Global Practice in Africa delivers more than 38 percent of committed resources to Satisfactory outcomes. The combined commitment across these seven sectors exceeds $65 billion. Between 62 and 96 cents of every dollar committed — depending on the sector — went to projects that did not achieve their development objectives. The Bank’s jobs agenda, health agenda, food security agenda, energy agenda, and connectivity agenda all depend on sectoral delivery. The commitment-weighted record says that delivery is failing at a scale the project-count metrics obscure. The large projects fail. The small ones sometimes succeed. The Bank scales up the large ones.
→ The Transport Record
The Education Record
The Water Record
The FCI Record
The Energy Record
The Health Record
The Agriculture Record
What Would Change the Equilibrium
Two reforms would introduce the accountability and contestability that eighty years of within-system reform have failed to produce.
Open IDA to competition. Allocate 25 percent of IDA resources competitively to non-Bank implementing partners — UNICEF, WFP, proven NGOs, bilateral agencies — evaluated on the same IEG Satisfactory standard as Bank projects. In a world where USAID has closed and hundreds of proven implementing organisations are hungry for capital, the Bank’s monopoly over IDA delivery is a policy choice, not a structural necessity. The Challenge Fund does not replace the Bank. It benchmarks it. If the Bank is as good as it claims, it has nothing to fear from competition. If it is not, the people it serves deserve to know. → IDA at 65: The Case for a Challenge Fund
Open the PSW to competition. Deploy 25 percent of Private Sector Window resources through non-IFC implementing partners, with independent verification of additionality. IFC currently both originates and assesses the additionality of its own transactions. That is not governance. It is self-certification. The PSW was designed to go where the private sector would not. It is being used to replace capital the IFC would have deployed anyway. → Rethinking the IDA Private Sector Window
The Common Thread
The World Bank and the IMF are the two institutions in the world where the past does not catch up with you.
At the World Bank, the task team leaders who designed and supervised the worst-performing projects in the portfolio — operations rated Unsatisfactory and Highly Unsatisfactory, projects that absorbed hundreds of millions of dollars and delivered nothing — were not disciplined. They were promoted. Many of them were promoted out of turn. They now occupy senior leadership positions across the institution — Regional Directors, Practice Managers, Country Directors — overseeing new portfolios of the same scale, in the same sectors, in the same countries where the projects they led failed. The $9.1 billion Eskom operation, rated Moderately Unsatisfactory, did not end a career. It advanced one. The $300 million urban transport project rated Unsatisfactory, the $255 million multi-modal transport project rated Highly Unsatisfactory, the $250 million competitiveness project rated Moderately Unsatisfactory — the people who led these operations are not in the institution’s past. They are in its present. They sit in the rooms where the next generation of projects is being designed. The incentive is clear: make a big splash, get the approval, secure the promotion, and move on before the IEG rating arrives. The rating arrives five to eight years after approval. By then the task team leader is two postings away. The country is still repaying the loan.
At the IMF, the pattern is identical. $170 billion in emergency financing was approved by the Managing Director and released into environments with high fiduciary risk — countries where the IMF’s own assessments flagged governance vulnerabilities — with no meaningful controls. The Managing Director’s guidance to borrowing governments was to “keep the receipts.” That was the fiduciary framework. The IMF’s own Legal Department subsequently documented governance failures across approximately 50 recipient countries. Budget losses of 20–30 percent. An Accountant General convicted. Officials across the continent prosecuted. People sitting in jail. The staff who designed the emergency disbursement framework, who approved the rapid financing instruments without safeguards, who argued that speed justified the absence of controls — they were not disciplined. They are still there. They were promoted through the system, and they now sit in the positions that will design the next emergency response. The Managing Director announced at the Spring Meetings 2026 that another $50 billion in emergency financing is anticipated. The institutional framework is the same. The people are the same. The cost — the corruption, the prosecutions, the destroyed institutions, the people in jail — was borne entirely by the borrowing countries. The IMF collected repayment in full.
The pattern is the same across 19th Street. At the Bank, the TTL gets promoted before the IEG rating arrives. At the Fund, the disbursement officer gets promoted before the Legal Department’s governance review lands. The cost is externalised to the borrower in both cases. The sovereign guarantee ensures that both institutions get repaid whether the project works or not, whether the money was stolen or spent. There is no market signal for failure. There is no institutional consequence for poor design. There is no career penalty for a Moderately Unsatisfactory rating at the Bank, and there is no career penalty for disbursing $3.4 billion through a convicted Accountant General at the Fund. The person who bears the cost is the farmer in Chad, the mother in the clinic in Dar es Salaam, the student in the school in Lagos, the civil servant in Abuja who followed procedures that the IMF designed and is now in prison for it. They repay the loans through their government’s debt service. They never see the IEG rating. They are never asked whether the project worked. That is what zero accountability looks like in practice — at both institutions, simultaneously, in the same countries, to the same people.
But the world has changed. USAID is gone. Bilateral development funding is under closer scrutiny than at any point since the end of the Cold War. The multilateral system is no longer the residual option — it is, for many countries, the only option. That concentration of responsibility demands a corresponding concentration of accountability. The status quo — comfortable, self-referencing, insulated from consequence — cannot carry on.
And here is the part that makes this argument reformist rather than prosecutorial: the World Bank has the people to make this work. It has the sectoral specialists, the evaluation infrastructure, the field presence, the institutional memory, and the lending instruments. The IFC has advisory teams that outperform its investment portfolio in fragile states. The IMF has Article IV surveillance that, at its best, provides the sharpest macroeconomic analysis available to any Finance Minister on earth. The problem has never been capability. It has been incentives.
Change the incentive structure and the same people will produce different results. Link career progression to IEG outcome ratings rather than approval volumes. Condition DPF disbursement on functional institutional change rather than legal compliance. Open IDA and the PSW to competitive allocation so the Bank is benchmarked against the organisations it should be partnering with. Delegate project approval to management so the Board can do what it has never done: hold someone accountable when $100 million is lent and the lights do not come on.
These are not radical proposals. They are the proposals the Bank’s own commissions, evaluators, and Nobel laureate reviewers have been making for decades. The game theory explains why they have not been adopted. It also explains what it would take. Only the Governors — the shareholders — can change the payoff structure. The equilibrium will not break from within.
The Spring Meetings are a production. Bollywood and Hollywood. The findings documented across this platform — over forty analyses, 10,542 evaluated projects, two decades of field evidence — were available to every participant in the room. They were not discussed. The equilibrium holds.
The question is not whether these institutions can do better. They can. The question is whether anyone with the authority to change the payoff structure will do so before the next $100 billion is committed.
→ The Spring Meetings: Bollywood and Hollywood
→ Why the System Does Not Learn: A Game Theory Analysis
All papers, datasets, and open letters are available at mdbreform.com. Full navigation: mdbreform.com/navigation. Data: mdbreform.com/data. Inquiries: fcvstrategy@gmail.com.
Parminder Brar is the founder of mdbreform.com and a former World Bank Country Manager and Lead Governance Specialist. Four field postings in FCV countries in Africa, 2003–2023.