An evaluation of the World Bank’s training for capacity building reveals serious flaws in design and implementation that undermine country ownership; the same criticism is being levelled at the IMF over its plans to charge for technical assistance.
Capacity building
Accountability
Background
BWI-UK / UKAN workshop on World Bank strategic review
Highlights of a 13 February 2008 UK NGO workshop discussing elements of the World Bank's long-term strategic review.
IFI governance
Background
The IFIs and Islamic finance
The World Bank Group and the IMF have become more involved in assistance to and oversight of Islamic financial institutions.
Finance
News
More Bank 'aid for trade'
Heads of the IFIs were in Geneva in November for a WTO conference to take stock of its aid for trade taskforce.
Accountability
Background
The World Bank and financial sector reform
Financial sector reform constitutes a major area of work for the World Bank.
Accountability
Analysis
Consolidating ideology in law?
The World Bank has vastly increased the resources it commits to good governance, with a large portion of that going to a complex and under-researched area: legal and judicial reform. Researcher Victoria Harris explores how the Bank uses such reforms to cement in place its preferred market-based development paradigm.
Accountability
News
Third researchers’ conference on the World Bank
The 2007 Annual Bank Conference on Development Economics (ABCDE) will take place 17-18 May in Bled, Slovenia. The third researchers' conference on the World Bank will be held in parallel.
Knowledge
News
Bank staffer slams funding for technical assistance
Buried in the text of the 2006 Global Monitoring Report, a Bank-Fund document to examine progress towards the MDGs, it suggests that technical cooperation funding not be tied to the countries giving the money.
Accountability
Background
Dialogue on the Doha trade round
Dialogue on the Doha trade round at the World Bank-IMF spring meetings in Washington, 20 April 2006.
Accountability
News
Donors’ group: “room for improvement” for Bank
The Multilateral Organisations Performance Assessment Network has published its 2005 survey of the perceptions of multilateral organisations at the country level, covering the World Bank, the UN Population Fund and UNAIDS.
Featured briefings
6 April 2023
World Bank and IMF Spring Meetings 2023
5 April 2023
The IMF at the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: The need for governance reform
As the world celebrates the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it is time the IMF’s shareholders use the opportunities provided by the anniversary and growing calls for reforms to the international financial architecture to redesign the IMF’s governance structures and programmes to ensure they are consistent with the commitments outlined in 1948 and with international human rights law.
5 April 2023
The global financial architecture and the international debt crisis: An urgent call for reform
Influence of unreformed international financial institutions and creditor interests in debt solutions in low- and middle-income countries plagued by delay and ineffective when undertaken.