The country studies found that the number of players is smaller in the transforming and urbanized economies than in agriculture-based settings. In Egypt, the country study found that the number of players in agriculture is limited, with the International Fund for Agricultural Development, FAO, and the Bank being the most active. In India, the government decided to limit the number of international development organizations that are active in the country, so the number of other donors that are active in agriculture is relatively small.
The number of players is smaller in the transforming and urbanized economies than in agriculture-based economies. There are some states where other development partners implement the same types of projects as the Bank. FAO organizes a forum regularly for information exchange among donors engaged in agriculture in India. In China, the Bank’s collaboration with other donors was mostly at the individual-project level. In both Azerbaijan and Bulgaria, the country studies found that there was informal collaboration between Bank staff and other donors, based on interpersonal relations rather than formal, structured mechanisms established between the institutions. In Azerbaijan, the country study noted that although the Bank does invite development partners to some key meetings, regular meetings for coordination and planning between agencies would be helpful. In Bulgaria, the most important donor partner is the European Union (EU), and while the Bank did not have a formal mechanism to coordinate with the EU, interviews with staff indicate that coordination was strong in the form of regular meetings and participation in Bulgaria’s own donor coordination meetings.
Those poorer economies that are heavily dependent on donor support generally have weaker capacity to coordinate. The agriculture-based and poorer economies are heavily dependent on donor support and generally have weaker capacity to coordinate. In Nepal, an agriculturebased economy heavily dependent on donor assistance, the country study notes the dominance of donors in designing and implementing programs. In Ethiopia, almost 20 donors were supporting more than 100 agricultural projects in 2005, with high transaction costs and duplication of effort (World Bank 2007b, p. 257). In Nicaragua, significant progress was achieved in formalizing a coordinated approach among donors through the establishment of the sectorwide approach
PRORURAL, which was based on the 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness. But in practice, apart from the Common Fund (Fonda Comun, a smaller group consisting of the aid agencies of the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Norway, Finland, Demark, and Luxembourg), which does meet frequently and coordinates the lending programs of its members, other donors tend to work independently of each other and provide mostly project-based aid. The Bank, too, decided not to pool its lending with other donors in support of PRORURAL, which led to considerable loss of credibility for the institution in the country. In Malawi, inconsistent donor policies and government priorities are reported to have redesigned national food security programs several times (World Bank 2007b). The Mali 2007 CAE (IEG 2007f, p. 10) is instructive in its finding in this regard: Still, significant challenges remain to turn Mali’s development effort away from being a largely donor-driven process and make it government-owned. One is that the government’s capacity to lead the partnership process is weak. The need to spend resources and show results pushes many donors to rely on international expertise instead of investing in local capacity-building. Another difficulty is the presence of a growing number of “non-traditional” donors which operate outside the normal coordination mechanisms, and which provide Mali with large, though frequently unspecified, sums not always on concessional terms. These include China, India, Libya, Saudi Arabia and a number of other countries from the Islamic world. There is also the issue of the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) which plans to invest about $461 million in Mali over a five-year period starting in late 2006 to help stimulate private sector growth. It is not clear, however, that the MCC has adequately taken into account Mali’s limited absorption capacity and other donors’ assistance programs.
IFC is involved in several of the World Bank’s partnerships, but has few opportunities to cofinance with other private sector development institutions. IFC, as a member of the World Bank Group, is in one way or another involved in several of the World Bank’s partnerships with other donors. Beyond this, IFC is working with the International Labour Organization to improve labor practices in Sub-Saharan Africa and is exploring opportunities for synergies with the African Development Bank.
Institutional Factors
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