Development Banks:

Assessing Results from Large-scale Funding

The international financial institutions (IFIs) provide the bulk of the funding for development efforts. But this also gives them a particular responsibility for assuring the quality of the activities they fund. We have worked with IFIs in a number of areas: project identification, appraisals, review missions, and evaluations.

Scanteam has lately been asked to assist IFIs with improving the quality assurance of project implementation by strengthening the results-based monitoring. This includes critically assessing performance frameworks, helping the parties develop better indicators, baselines, and data for monitoring progress. Linked with this is work to strengthen local authorities’ ability to track and enhance project results.

Clients:

• The World Bank
• The Inter-American Development Bank
• The International Finance Corporation (World Bank)
• The Nordic Development Bank
• The Nordic Investment Fund

Development Banks and Fragile States

The World Bank and regional Development Banks use somewhat different definitions and operational guidelines for supporting Fragile States (FS). At the same time, the international community recognises FS as a serious development issue, and during 2007 the major IFIs presented revised strategies for aiding FS.

Scanteam was contracted to review the revised strategies of three IFIs, finding increasing consistency but still considerable differences, and in particular one bank with a very poor and inconsistent approach to FS.

The analysis on the World Bank was presented to a large international donor workshop.
Like many other Scanteam tasks, these studies brought together different kinds of experience: knowledge of the IFIs, about FS, and specific insights into how IFI funding has worked in FS contexts.