World Bank Shareholding Review must deliver a better deal for African governments
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Article summary
- 2025 World Bank shareholding review offers a key chance to correct persistent governance imbalances that favour high-income countries.
- African constituencies face disproportionate membership size, limited staffing and structural constraints.
- Civil society calls for a shift in voting rights, more African chairs and decision-making reforms.
The World Bank was ostensibly created as a financial cooperative to support postwar reconstruction and later expanded to provide development financing to countries around the world that had limited access to private markets (see Inside the institutions, What are the Bretton Woods Institutions). Because its founding relied on capital guarantees from a small number of rich countries, its governance architecture was designed to reflect each member’s economic weight. This logic – rooted in the geopolitics of the immediate post WWII period – persists today. High-income countries collectively hold more than 60 per cent of voting power, with the United States alone enjoying over 15 per cent and effective veto authority (see Inside the Institutions, IMF and World Bank decision-making and governance).
The upcoming 2025 Shareholding Review – held every five years – offers the Bank a chance to ensure its governance is adjusted to reflect the global economy and the needs of its members. The Review allows shareholders to adjust voting power, reconsider board composition, and update the metrics used to gauge economic weight. This year’s review unfolds amid a broader crisis of multilateralism, shaped by geopolitical fragmentation and longstanding imbalances in the international financial system that collective action has repeatedly failed to resolve.
Although the distribution of voting shares at the World Bank has shifted incrementally over the decades, the underlying hierarchy has remained intact. Borrower countries, which engage the Bank most deeply and are most affected by its decisions, continue to occupy structurally subordinate positions. Attempts to rebalance representation have yielded limited results. The 2010 Shareholding Review resulted in voice reforms that shifted a modest share of votes to developing and transition countries, but the inclusion of several high-income economies within that category diluted the intended effect. Meanwhile, proposals that rely on expanding “basic votes” – the equal votes allocated to each member regardless of economic size – have tended to be too modest to alter the balance of power. Basic votes account for only 5.5 per cent of total voting power, and even doubling or tripling this share would leave the overwhelming majority of votes tied to capital subscriptions dominated by high-income countries. Because basic votes are split equally among more than 190 members, small increases are quickly diluted, while the United States and other major shareholders retain decisive influence through their share-based votes. Incremental adjustments therefore leave the core hierarchy unchanged; only a major reweighting of basic votes or a move toward genuine parity would meaningfully redistribute authority.
Lopsided constituencies leave African governments under-represented
This broader imbalance is mirrored in the day-to-day functioning of the board, where African executive directors (EDs) face layers of structural, procedural and administrative constraints that limit their ability to represent their constituencies effectively. Unlike their counterparts from high-income countries, who often represent a single country with deep technical ministries behind them, African EDs must speak for as many as 20 to 24 countries. The first African executive director (EDS 13), currently from Cabo Verde, represents 23 countries. The second African ED (EDS 14), currently from Tanzania, represents 22 countries. On the other hand, EDS 25, currently from Nigeria, represents only three countries: Angola, Nigeria and South Africa. This creates enormous coordination burdens: capital consultations take longer; diverse priorities must be reconciled; and governments rotate into ED seats so infrequently that internal negotiations become unusually time-consuming. Meanwhile, ED offices have fixed staffing ceilings that do not scale with constituency size. This heightens that administrative burden on African EDs who must review dozens of complex documents under the same tight deadlines as EDs representing only one or two countries, often without the benefit of deep in-house expertise.
These challenges are compounded by Bank procedures that were never intended for representatives carrying such heavy loads. Institutional procedures governing meeting access, document review and preparation timelines implicitly assume a manageable constituency size. For EDs representing twenty or more countries, these rules function as structural constraints: they compress already-thin capacity, curtail meaningful engagement and mute the collective voice of the countries most reliant on the Bank. The cumulative effect is a chronic shortage of time, voice and strategic bandwidth for African EDs – precisely the group that should have the strongest say in shaping an institution whose work overwhelmingly affects their constituents.
These inequities extend beyond Africa to regions like Asia where populous countries like Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka share a single ED while Japan holds its own seat; in Latin America and the Caribbean, small island states are often grouped with far larger middle-income economies. Such mismatches highlight the systemic nature of the governance challenge facing the World Bank, even if it is most acute – and most consequential – in Africa.
A new path to fairer governance
Rebalancing the World Bank’s governance will require more than technical adjustments; it demands a reframing of whose perspectives and experiences are treated as central to global development decision-making – and the 2025 Shareholding Review represents an opportunity to do that (see Observer Autumn 2025).
A more representative system could be built around three mutually reinforcing shifts. First, the Bank must move toward a distribution of voting power that gives borrower countries meaningful influence. Creating a more even split between share-based and membership-based votes, and establishing parity among borrower and creditor countries in membership-based votes, would allow the institution’s decisions to reflect the priorities of the countries whose development trajectories are most at stake. Second, the chronic underrepresentation of Africa on the Board must be addressed directly by adding additional African chairs. Reducing constituency sizes from more than 20 countries to something closer to 10 or 12 would markedly improve consultation depth, increase responsiveness to national contexts. Third, for policies directly affecting borrowers, a double-majority system – requiring approval both by overall voting power and by a majority of borrowing members – would help ensure that countries most exposed to the Bank’s lending and conditionalities have a decisive say in shaping them.
The proposed reforms would enhance the Bank’s legitimacy and effectiveness and make it more fit for purpose in our contemporary world.
