This volume reports on a conference held by the World Bank's independent Operations Evaluation Department (OED) to discuss the Bank's rote in global program partnerships. The starting point for the discussions was a comprehensive review by OED of the effectiveness of 26 of the largest programs,...

This 2004 Annual Review of Development Effectiveness (ARDE): The World Bank's Contributions to Poverty Reduction, looks at the growth and poverty reduction experience of client countries. It assesses the extent to which Bank interventions have contributed to growth and poverty reduction and the...

This evaluation assesses the relevance and effectiveness of Bank support for public sector capacity building in Africa, over the past 10 years. It draws on studies of Benin, Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, Mali, and Mozambique; aggregate assessments of country strategies and operations across the Bank's...

This book finds that there is a strong positive association between including social development themes and project success. The Bank's social development resources are deployed in ways that are not optimally supportive of its social development goals, however. The study found that the Bank's...

The nine Pacific Member Countries (PMCs) of the World Bank Group are Fiji Islands, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, Palau, Samoa, the Solomon Islands, Tonga , and Vanuatu. This evaluation covers Bank assistance to the PMCs since 1992. The Country Assistance...

Brazil entered the 1990s suffering the consequences of a lost decade of high inflation and slow growth. Between 1980 and 1990, per capita income declined in real terms, and the share of the population in extreme poverty rose from 16.5 to 19 percent -and from 36 to 42 percent in the Northeast....

The Millennium Development Goals aim for universal primary education by 2015 and gender equality in enrolments at all levels of education. The Education for All (EFA) initiative lays out a strategy for achieving these goals. The Bank's own strategy stresses the school quality aspects of EFA,...

This evaluation builds upon OED's earlier work to assess how well the PRS Initiative has helped thus far in putting the CDF principles into action, how relevant it is to countries' quest for sustainable poverty reduction, and how effectively the Bank has supported and aligned its own programs...

This report completes the second phase of the Operations Evaluation Department's independent evaluation of the World Bank's involvement in global programs. This Phase 2 report is based on case studies of 26 (of a total of 70) Bank-supported global programs that accounted for 90 percent of the...