Sponsor: World Bank (Concessional Financing and Partnerships Vice Presidency)

Panelists:

• Joachim von Amsberg, vice president for concessional finance and global partnerships
• Antonella Bassani, director, IDA resource mobilisation

Presentations

Joachim von Amsberg

• IDA can look back at a good track record, it’s one of the most transparent sources of dev finance, delivers high value for money results
• Broad success means sometimes things go wrong – this is the nature of development, the question is if we learn from this
• The multilateral nature creates political insulation, the resources are governed by 180 member countries which is one of the secrets of its success
• Invest in country governments and institutions, which is different to work directly with private sector
• Business model, country government budget expenditures, helping build sustainable institutions
• Critical that investment raise quality of capacity in the country, while providing basic assurances money not stolen and vulnerable communities protected
• Not business as usual, world is changing very rapidly
• Developing countries have more access to resources than for a long time, including new sources from developing countries
• Developing finance incl IDA becoming small, need to think harder how to leverage the resources
• How to use IDA to attract private investment, with IFC, and to create jobs
• How to make sure IDA investment gets leveraged by best international knowledge and experiences
• Most valuable thing is to connect leaders, policy makers, around the world to help them
• Conflict, exclusion – economic growth not always leading to benefits for all, including natural resources wealth
• 17 replenishment of IDA, big tension between high ambitions and that the vision is feasible with adequate resources, on the other hand the difficult fiscal environment in donor countries
• Need to make a joint case for development finance – that aid and IDA produce results, tax payer money is well spent

Antonella Bassani

• It’s the only entity that every three year need to go back and review
• Replenishment usually start going with stocktaking
• IDA 16 mid term review, late 2012 in Abijan, implementation of IDA16 broadly going well according to participants
• Starting discussion on IDA17, continued in Paris meeting in March
• Initial discussion on strategic issues – including overarching theme – ‘maximising development impact’ agreed
• Special themes for replenishment, not where resources should go, but where IDA should do more
• Four special themes, three decided to be the same as IDA 16 – gender equality, support for fragile and conflict affected states and climate change
• Fourth inclusive growth – for this replenishment, three focus areas: jobs, financial inclusion, natural resource wealth
• Many IDA countries have increased access to resources from natural resource wealth, increased financial flows linked to this – these can make a change if well utilised and distributed
• Three more meetings expected, Managua, Nicaragua in early July – focus on discussion of underlying issues on overarching and special themes, start discuss the financial envelope
• Washington at end of annual meeting – completing discussion on overarching and special themes, and advance financing discussions
• Deputies report for IDA 17, captures broad agreements and direction
• When participants give green light, probably end October, will make the report available and ask for comments.
• Fourth meeting in December in Russia, pledging session and deputies final version of the report.

WB/IDA person

• Last time there were three weeks consultation, with CSO comments, some specific suggestions, some very good – text that came directly from a couple of CSOs, eg maternal and child health, reproductive health

Questions

Original IDA priority on regional transformational infrastructure but dropped, what is the background? Fiscal contraction and ability to achieve four goals, in particular with big capital intensive infrastructure.

Recipient of IDA fund, how are you using the money for the community – what feedback strategy?

How do you balance needs vs performance, given increased fragility? Position in the current financial constrained environment?

Von Amsberg

• Increasing demand for investment that cuts across countries, not only for infrastructure, many of these projects are high priority, key for African development
• Created IDA regional window for programmes, explored options for taking this further, including as a special theme
• The feedback was that this is more an operational issue than special theme, it’s not comparable to policy issues, so didn’t fit the logic
• So instead we’ll change the operational rules, but not making it a showcase theme
• The undertone in renewable energy, including hydro power, have in the past been very controversial – need to demonstrate that we’ve learned from the past
• Fiscal contraction – there is a real tension between ambition and feasibility for making real progress, as countries have announced cuts in aid budgets
• This is the time to show that it would be a fatal mistake to cut back
• Building blocks, implementation support – working with the government in procurement of goods and services, auditing
• We have the independent evaluation group, they are very independent, often says things we don’t want to hear – but it’s good that we have this institution, tools for assessing the effectiveness
• We have an anti corruption hot line
• There is also the inspection panel and more recently many projects include citizen feedback – we need to move away from a WB centric model to a country centric model

Bassani

• One job to report to donor and IDA countries, where the resources have gone and results
• In addition to public information, we also have accountability mission to explain to countries where the money has gone. We have different mechanisms, including result stories on specific project and programmes
• We are increasingly asked to report on quantitative results, difficult to measure support to strengthen institutions

WB/IDA person

• There’s a finite pot of resources to divide, all IDA countries are poor with huge needs
• To generate maximum effect of the resources, we have to have better policies and institutions
• This leaves countries with relatively poorer performance with less resources, but with some exceptions, e.g. countries emerging from conflict with enormous reconstruction needs
• WB done a lot of work on the operational side in fragile and conflict affected states (FCAS), in replenishment looking at how to find ways to give more resources to countries that are turning around
• IDA countries moving quicker towards the threshold are those with good performance, makes more space for those that remain

Questions

Country strengthening of institutions, what could the relationship be with civil society – what could change look like, what is a good service for example, for the communities?

What about countries that are very slow to graduate?

Vision of future as more countries start to graduate, do you see IDA changing to fit the new world?

IDA business model, running for three decades, how far does this model take us in the future – is there any framework to involve civil society organisations?

To what extent IDA projects or programmes fund country assistance?

You mentioned using IFC for private investment, could you tell us more?

IDA16, 3 years ago had a record amount, but given the difficult fiscal condition how much are we looking for now?

Is it possible to work from a behaviour change model, rather than economic change (eg corruption) – have you considered this?

Von Amsberg

• Vision of IDA, there are a couple of direction
• IDA need to develop into a body that is at the front of the multi directional reality of today, rather than the past – countries learning from each other today, some rich countries are getting into trouble, middle income countries are major financiers to low income countries – envisions a stronger role for MICs
• IDA platform for delivering results by supporting country partners, could it be used as a platform for other development discussions, eg IDA and climate change? IDA has comparative advantage, work with countries on investment programmes that aren’t always climate resilient – knows how to translate money to result
• Quantitative target – not there yet, but consulting with shareholders, if as strong as last IDA that’s probably a good result
• IFC, as a sense of direction, linked to the WB strategy by Jim Yong Kim trying to find better ways to leverage IDA and IFC working together so IDA works to create environment that attract the private investment, e.g. like in Myanmar
• Much closer way of working together than in the past

Bassani

• With countries that are slow to graduate, this is also linked to credit worthiness for IBRD
• Graduation processes shouldn’t be sudden, otherwise they will graduate back again in a few years, e.g. related to dependency on one resource
• Close to 40 countries by the end of IDA 16
• Cofounded projects with e.g. regional funders, government public resources, multidonor funds
• Behavioural change, evolution of IDA to finance specific physical interventions, to try and affect policy, and results based approaches
• Increasingly IDA has evolved to behavioural type interventions

WB/IDA person

• Lot of IDA support to governments go to activities with CSOs