Recovery and Peacebuilding Assessments —a tool to prevent conflict and promote peace

With conflicts worldwide becoming increasingly complex and a proven correlation between extreme poverty and fragile and conflict-affected situations, the Recovery and Peacebuilding Assessment (RPBA) is just one way that the international community is partnering to address these challenges. RPBAs are assessments supported by the World Bank Group (WBG), European Union (EU) and the United Nations to coordinate engagement in countries or regions emerging from conflict or political crisis.  These assessments help to ensure that international and national interventions are aligned through a process that provides a common platform to help governments and their international partners assess, plan, prioritize and sequence recovery and peacebuilding activities.

With conflicts becoming more complicated and protracted, the responses by the international community to countries in conflict or emerging from conflict require swift and effective measures coordinated across humanitarian, development, peacebuilding, and security actors.

A multi-stakeholder analytical and coordination platform such as the RPBA is increasingly being used to improve alignment of technical assistance and aid flows among multiple partners with identified conflict and peacebuilding priorities.  Previously used mostly during and immediately following conflict, this approach is currently being used ahead of the start of active conflict with a Prevention and Peacebuilding Assessment (PPBA) underway in Burkina Faso.

Financed by the State and Peacebuilding Fund, the RPBA Support Facility has made the WBG more proactive in supporting countries to address challenges in contexts either in conflict or emerging from it. The Facility financing has strengthened the WBG’s capacity to support early government recovery and reconstruction planning efforts and to more efficiently convene collaborative platforms, further enhanced by the partnership with the EU and UN to forge a more targeted and coordinated response during the early stages of conflict response.

Between 2016-2018, the Facility supported the implementation of RPBAs in the Central African Republic and Cameroon. The facility co-financed World Bank core contributions of approximately $600,000 and leveraged approximately $3.4 million in additional resources in support of country-specific recovery and peacebuilding processes.

In Cameroon, where conflict in the Far North region threatened to spill over to other parts of the country, the Facility was instrumental in allowing the RPBA to engage the population at large in the planning process, including financing a household and perception survey and a qualitative consultation process in four affected northern and eastern regions. 

The resulting Recovery and Peace Consolidation Strategy created a platform for the government and partners to coordinate support towards addressing long-standing challenges of marginalization, vulnerability, and poor access to services, as well as more recent challenges associated with an increase in food insecurity and disease epidemics due to the deteriorating economic landscape, climate-related events, and a deteriorated security environment and wide-spread displacement caused by the Boko Haram insurgency in neighboring Nigeria. The RPBA approach successfully helped the government to respond to subnational pressures and prevent an escalation and spillover of the security and displacement crisis created by Boko Haram.

The challenges were also daunting in the Central African Republic—where more than two years of armed confrontation and decades of poor governance and underdevelopment had adversely affected the country. Following peaceful elections in 2016, the new government requested support from the EU, UN and WBG to carry out an RPBA. The result—the 5-year National Recovery and Peacebuilding Plan (RCPCA)—was adapted by parliament, and received US$ 2.2 billion in pledges during the subsequent donors conference in Brussels. The RPBA Facility allowed the WBG to immediately mobilize support to the government to develop, and subsequently implement the Plan.

The Facility has also financed the early mobilization of WBG support to explore joint recovery and peacebuilding assessments and planning processes in Iraq, the Philippines, Libya, Yemen, and Zimbabwe. Such help has proven critical in garnering immediate support to governments during the early stages of recovery and reconstruction, and to generate a shared understanding among government and partners regarding the challenges that would need to be overcome to support peace and stability in these countries.

The WBG —together with its RPBA partners—is committed to helping countries emerge from conflict through peacebuilding and recovery efforts.  They are also doing more to address conflict risks early on before they become full blown crises.  By focusing on prevention, the international community can direct more resources to sustainable development outcomes, rather than continuously respond to emergencies.  The RPBA Facility is just one way the WBG is delivering on these commitments.