Africa LEADS: Integrating knowledge and operations for a better Bank

Imagine a life without electricity to light up your home, clean water to drink from, and where 90 percent of your children’s friends cannot read. This is the reality for millions of families across Eastern and Southern Africa, and this needs to urgently change.

While resources are critical for tackling these enormous development challenges, equally important is how these resources are used. Not every dollar spent on development financing is equal. The limited resources available must go to where they can generate the most value.  That’s why earlier this year the World Bank Group released the Knowledge Compact for Action with the overriding goal to mobilize groundbreaking development knowledge for our clients and empower governments with the evidence needed to make the biggest difference with available resources.

But what does this look like in action? A shining example is the Africa LEADS (Learn. Adapt. Scale.) program, which was launched in May this year. This innovative collaboration between the World Bank’s Eastern and Southern Africa region and the Development Impact Group links operations and research to improve the design and implementation of regional lending programs. In other words, more bang for the buck. This is not an academic endeavor—replicating and scaling up this work could potentially double the impact of development finance.

Africa LEADS is the type of program that’s key to our efforts to become a better World Bank, one that is a better partner to the people we serve. 

“We need to learn from experience and avoid repeating the mistakes of the past,” said Indermit Gill, Chief Economist of the World Bank Group and Senior Vice President for Development Economics. “Fundamental to this is better project design and implementation. We are ready to help.”

A better Bank also means closer cooperation between our organization’s regions and practice groups to support clients in maximizing the effects on the ground. "Countries in East and Southern Africa want to use their limited development resources for the biggest impact,” said Victoria Kwakwa, the World Bank’s Vice President for Eastern and Southern Africa. “This collaboration will provide critical knowledge in real time to inform optimum policy and service delivery choices.”

To start, the Africa LEADS program selected 30 projects to focus on, with $12.8 billion worth of investments from the World Bank. Project teams, made up of those from country governments and the World Bank, were matched with global researchers for a week-long deep dive in Cape Town, South Africa. Together, they explored how to use existing evidence to inform project design and to develop a flexible roadmap for the project’s implementation that allows it to be adapted along the way as new evidence becomes available.

This approach has already sped up and improved project preparation. Initial estimates indicate that replicating proven ideas across the selected projects adds approximately $238 million in value to their impact. And more gains are expected as the projects continue to ramp up through additional testing and innovation, replication across countries, and scaling up.

The Cape Town workshop also highlighted numerous innovations with the potential to make World Bank-financed programs even more impactful if they are replicated and expanded in other countries and regions. Key findings include:

People:

• Economic inclusion programs deliver cash, assets, and training to unlock the productive potential of households, which can lead to a large and sustained reduction in poverty. Optimizing the cost-effectiveness of these packages will double the number of people helped across the region.
• Affordable devices with preloaded apps can help address Africa’s literacy crisis. Literacy apps in native languages teach reading five times faster than in-school instruction at one-hundredth of the cost.

Prosperity:

• Role model videos increase women’s participation in training by 50 percent and dual apprenticeships increase quality jobs by 25 percent and salaries by 15 percent. At the same time, machine learning based on artificial intelligence algorithms helped identify 3.6 times the number of firms to be targeted for apprenticeship programs.
• Shifting to local procurement of school meals increased the availability of meals by 74 percent in Burundi. In Jordan, it tripled women’s income. It also provides steady demand for local food markets. Countries like Madagascar and Zambia are replicating the model.

Planet:

• Across multiple countries and settings, water treatment lowered the number of deaths of children age 5 and younger by a quarter on average. By adopting proven water treatment in project areas, Ethiopia will save the lives of over 3,500 children. At scale, Ethiopia could save the lives of 200,000 children. Across Africa, the lives of over 8 million children could be saved.
• Prepaid meters increase water conservation by 14 percent and utility revenues by 23 percent. Improved collection of energy and water utility bills could help recover up to $135 billion a year of uncollected utility bills globally.
• In Mozambique, optimizing the design of agricultural input subsidies into flexible eVouchers, which offer progressively smaller subsidy rates for larger input packages, can increase their productive impacts by 56 percent under a fixed budget for subsidies. Flexible vouchers are being scaled regionally. Across Africa they would save $360 million annually while achieving the same productive impacts as existing subsidies.

Infrastructure:

• Geographic targeting, subsidies for productive inputs, and increased private sector involvement can boost the effectiveness of national energy access programs by one third.
• Impact evaluations will help provide the data needed to increase financing for the transition away from carbon-intensive energy across Eastern and Southern African countries, expanding access to clean cooking technology and improving health.

While the results from the Africa LEADS workshop were impressive, this is just the start. This approach is being rolled out first to West Africa and then will expand globally. Maximizing the limited resources currently available can help stretch them even further, ultimately improving more lives across Africa and the world. This is what a better Bank looks like.