Globally, the World Bank has supported governments in creating employment opportunities, enhancing service delivery, and developing infrastructure in post-conflict settings. Additionally, it has been a key partner for governments to support development of fragility and conflict sensitive approaches. This is achieved by investing in a deep understanding of the local context and ensuring that development responses are attuned to the factors driving fragility.
In this blog, we focus on Tajikistan — the poorest country in Central Asia — where the World Bank has invested $90 million in fragile, conflict and violence (FCV) financing and applied an inclusion and resilience lens. The inclusion and resilience lens is a framework that guides project teams to integrate fragility, inclusion, and resilience considerations into projects.
Nearly 30 years ago, Tajikistan signed a peace agreement after a five-year civil war that claimed 20,000 lives, displaced 600,000 people, devastated the economy. Since then, the country has maintained relative political stability. But pockets of fragility persist in border districts near the Kyrgyz Republic and in the Gorno-Badakhshan Region. Across these regions, women, young people, and border communities often face social and economic exclusion.
Inclusion and Resilience Lens
Since 2022, the World Bank has integrated an Inclusion and Resilience Lens (IRL) into its development portfolio in Tajikistan. The IRL assists project teams in comprehending specific risks associated with potential exclusion, such as ensuring equal access to facilities, services, and opportunities for different groups of people. It also identifies opportunities related to resilience, which pertain to the capacity of individuals, groups, governments, and systems to manage stress and fragility. This approach enables teams to proactively incorporate inclusion and resilience considerations into project design and implementation. The approach is facilitated by a small, dedicated team that works across the portfolio to provide hands-on technical and facilitation support to sectoral project teams to understand and integrate inclusion and resilience considerations in the World Bank-financed projects.
Early wins
Projects that benefit from the IRL show a better understanding of the risks related to fragility and exclusion. They introduce activities to tackle these issues. For instance, IRL support identified risks of exclusion for informal waste pickers in a planned urban development project in Dushanbe. This helped the team design specific actions to ensure these workers are included in the project's benefits. Similarly, IRL support for a digital foundations project in Tajikistan highlighted the need for digital literacy in vulnerable and rural areas. It assisted in creating activities to improve digital skills and generate income at the community level. Additionally, IRL directly enhanced the capacity of clients involved in health and social protection projects in Tajikistan. It helped incorporate considerations of inclusion and resilience into project activities, such as conducting surveys to gauge service quality and satisfaction, tailoring interventions at the district level by understanding local political dynamics, especially in border areas, and strengthening project frameworks to capture results and lessons related to inclusion and resilience.
Partnership played a key role
In Central Asia, the World Bank partnered with the UK Government on this critical agenda. World Bank and Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office joined hands to conduct a Regional Risk and Resilience Assessment covering Central Asia – Afghanistan border areas (2021). This was a critical partnership to jointly identify key drivers of fragility and sources of resilience in the region. The World Bank then developed an implementation plan to take forward these findings, including the roll out of the IRL. This collaboration has allowed the two organizations to have a common understanding of the fragility context, share experiences and invest in developing tools such as the IRL that supported the projects to respond to the fragility risks through concrete project activities and approaches.
Lessons for Development
The experience of implementing IRL in Tajikistan provides many lessons for other development partners interested in taking a fragility sensitive approach to their development portfolios. First, the senior leadership within an organization needs to champion this approach from the top. Without this, it is not possible to solidify this commitment across the portfolio and to integrate fragility and inclusion agenda into the DNA of project designs. Second, it is important to be pragmatic and co-create responses to fragility risks with project teams. Over the years, the IRL team placed less emphasis on templates and more on facilitation and technical support to make this happen. Third, inclusion and resilience considerations are not only relevant at the project design phase but are equally beneficial in the early stages of implementation. Undoubtedly, the greatest value is in the design phase, but results of IRL supporting projects in early stages of implementation were also positive. It allowed the World Bank to build implementing partner’s capacity to understand these considerations and integrate them in implementation which is also critical for results on the ground. Fourth, inclusion and resilience considerations should also be actively explored and included in policy dialogues with national governments. It helps create a platform for candid discussions on fragility issues with governments.
Experience from Tajikistan suggests that IRL can be a strong tool to help portfolios and project teams better address risks related to fragility and exclusion. It encourages the inclusion of activities in projects that directly reduce exclusion-related fragility and build resilience. While the development community already has effective tools for active conflict settings, there is room for improvement in countries that are not in active conflict but need investments to support prevention efforts. This can help prevent these countries from falling into active conflict. For the IRL to be truly effective and not just a symbolic gesture, it requires dedicated support and resources.
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