FAST TRACK BRIEF. The Africa Action Plan: An IEG Evaluation

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1 FAST TRACK BRIEF February 2, 2011 The IEG report The Africa Action Plan: An IEG Evaluation, was discussed by CODE on February 2, 2011 The Africa Action Plan: An IEG Evaluation The Africa Action Plan was launched by the World Bank Group in 2005 to help accelerate achievement of the Millennium Development Goals by the countries of Sub-Saharan Africa. This evaluation assesses the effectiveness of the Plan against its objectives, focusing both on its usefulness as a management tool in guiding the Bank Group s support to the region and on the outcomes of the support in areas covered by the Plan. The evaluation finds that weaknesses in preparation and implementation processes limited the relevance and use of the Africa Action Plan as a management tool. Contrary to initial expectations, the Plan remained a Bank-driven initiative with only marginal IFC and MIGA involvement. The Plan did not make a significant difference to the prioritization of WBG support, accountability for results, strategic partnerships, harmonization with donors, or aid effectiveness. The Plan also did not succeed in catalyzing a significant increase in resource flows to Africa. The development agenda supported under the Plan was, with some exceptions, relevant to the needs of African countries and consistent with the Bank Group s other strategies and commitments. Africa has made notable progress in the past decade, albeit with vast country variations. The Bank Group has scaled-up its support to Africa over the past five years, and the trends in the composition of this support are mostly sound, meeting some of the Plan s objectives. But these developments appear to have happened largely independently of the Africa Action Plan. The outcomes of the Bank support, as seen from other IEG studies, have been mixed, with large variations across countries and sectors, underlining both the potential and challenges of the continent. Good progress has been made, for example, in promoting economic policies conducive to private sector development, in contrast to the meager gains in strengthening national and regional institutions. A regional action plan can provide strategic directions and contribute to results over and above what country strategies can achieve. The evaluation finds that the Africa Action Plan did not play such a role with respect to the development agenda and outcomes for the Bank Group support to Africa. Perhaps even more importantly, the Plan was not a useful vehicle for the Bank Group to provide strategic leadership to the donor community for advancing the Gleneagles objective of more and more effective aid to Africa. Over the past decade Africa has made significant progress in moving away from the stagnation of the 1980s and 1990s, benefitting from both external and domestic factors. Nevertheless, Africa remains the world s most formidable development challenge. Of the 30 lowest-ranked countries on the United Nations Development Program s Human Development Index, 28 are in Africa. Twenty of the 47 countries in the region are classified as fragile and conflict affected states (FCSs) by the World Bank. Outcomes and performance have varied a great deal across countries and over time. For the continent as a whole, however, the real per capita income increased a mere 44 percent over the past 50 years.

2 The Africa Action Plan (AAP) was launched by the World Bank in 2005 to help accelerate achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by the countries of Sub- Saharan Africa (the Bank s Africa Region). Working together with other development partners, the World Bank Group (WBG) was to assist every African country achieve as many of the MDGs as possible by The launch of the AAP reflected emerging consensus among the Bank s shareholders about the need for a big push forward on Africa to be underpinned by more and more effective aid. The AAP was meant to be a management tool, proposing a resultsoriented framework, monitoring and reporting to strengthen accountability for progress towards achieving the MDGs. The AAP was intended to be a living document with regular reviews and midcourse adjustments. The AAP, as originally designed, consisted of 109 actions and 30 objectives grouped in five focal areas. Following the first review in 2007, the AAP was consolidated around eight flagship areas and three cross-cutting themes, as the original AAP was found to be too comprehensive to be an effective management tool. The second review in 2009 proposed further consolidation of the AAP around six themes. Besides changes in nomenclature (from focal areas to flagships and crosscutting themes to themes) and regrouping of the various sectors and themes, the 2007 and the 2009 reviews also led to changes in emphasis or approach in several areas, including environment, education, gender, and health. Despite these changes, the results areas covered by the AAP accelerating growth, promoting inclusive and sustainable growth, building capable states and improving governance, and improving aid effectiveness have remained broadly stable. Evaluation Objectives, Approach, and Limitations The primary objective of this evaluation is to assess the effectiveness of the AAP against its stated objectives, including its usefulness as a management tool in guiding the Bank Group s assistance in the Africa Region. The evaluation is also expected to provide lessons from the AAP experience to inform the design of the new strategy being prepared by the Africa Region. The evaluation covers the 2005 AAP as well as the subsequent revisions made through the 2007 and 2009 progress reports. Because of the limited involvement of IFC and MIGA, the evaluation focuses on Bank activities. However, to gain a better understanding of why the AAP remained primarily a World Bank initiative, the evaluation also examines World Bank interactions with IFC and MIGA during the design and implementation of the AAP. The evaluation approach has been influenced by ambiguities in the coverage and scope of the AAP, the dynamic nature of the AAP (with significant design changes during implementation), weaknesses in its results framework, and lack of data tracking its implementation and results. As a result of these factors, the evaluation had to infer the results framework underpinning the three different formulations of the AAP. In so doing, it draws on informed and structured judgments of knowledgeable interviewees within a well defined evaluation framework, as in other similar instances. Also, as the short timeframe for this evaluation limited the extent of primary evaluation work, the evaluation builds on existing evaluative material from IEG and others, supplemented by focused analysis in some key areas. As actions included under the AAP cover only a subset of the WBG program in the Africa Region, it is important to stress that this evaluation is not a full-fledged evaluation of the Africa program. It should also be noted that because most of the desired outcomes for the AAP are long-gestating in nature, the results during the AAP period flow in part from actions taken before 2005 and, similarly, some Bank activities and investments during the AAP period are likely to bear fruit only in the years to come. Main Findings The AAP as a Management Tool Overall, the AAP had limited impact on Bank support to Africa. The Plan contributed positively to some changes in the regional skills mix and to obtaining modest increases in administrative budgets for the Bank s Africa Region (AFR). However, the Plan did not notably contribute to sharpening the priorities for Bank support, reexamining AFR s business processes to meet the increased expectations of the donor community, strengthening the outcomes of Bank assistance, promoting intra-bank Group collaboration, or leveraging partner resources to help scale up development assistance. Accordingly, the evaluation concludes that the AAP as an instrument has not had a significant influence on accelerating achievement of the MDGs in the countries of Sub-Saharan Africa. The AAP objective of helping accelerate achievement of the MDGs was highly relevant for the Bank s support to Africa. The AAP s negligible impact is due to deficiencies in its preparation and implementation processes. The AAP was a topdown initiative, poorly conceived and hastily prepared. Its preparation involved little staff participation and no systematic consultation with clients or other development partners. Accordingly, these key constituencies had no ownership of the AAP. The lack of participation and consultation also meant missing out on the extensive sector and country knowledge inside and outside of the Bank relevant to the design of the AAP. The 2005 AAP drew on existing strategies and work programs, proposing a long and detailed action plan that was essentially the aggregation of ongoing country and sector work programs in the Region. In preparing the AAP, the Africa Region did not take advantage of the renewed global focus on Africa to rethink the priority agenda for enhancing the development effectiveness of Bank assistance to the Region. In particular, the AAP missed an opportunity to help 2

3 advance the critically important capacity enhancement agenda. It also had insufficient focus on several important sectoral and thematic issues quality of learning in schools, reproductive health, environmental sustainability, youth unemployment, and overburdened urban services. Despite the large number of actions, the 2005 AAP did not capture the focus and intensity of the WBG s actual engagement in Africa in several areas. Actual WBG involvement in support of private sector development, financial sector development, and environmental sustainability, for example, was substantially broader than implied by the AAP. The AAP also did not articulate adequately the Bank Group support for the fragile and conflict-affected states and middle-income countries in Africa. The 2007 and 2009 progress reports recognized that the large number of actions and objectives included under the 2005 AAP meant a loss of focus as well as difficulties in monitoring and managing the Plan. They consolidated the actions into a more coherent framework, though they did not report on all the 2005 actions or provide a clear rationale for the changes to the Plan. The simultaneous problems of overextension and omissions raise questions about the suitability of a detailed action plan to cover WBG support to a region as heterogeneous as Sub- Saharan Africa. The needs are so different among countries and the Bank Group programs so diverse that bundling them into a single action plan with a single results framework was simply impractical. Much more relevant and useful would have been articulation of the key strategic priorities for the medium-term and related constraints to guide the formulation of country-level programs. Problems related to the inappropriateness of the instrument were compounded by inadequate attention to integrating the AAP into the country-based business model of the Bank. Country Assistance Strategies (CASs) are the Bank s principal strategic and business planning documents. Corporate and regional initiatives, if they are to have traction, must be translated into specific actions through the CAS mechanism. The AAP was ignored as a framework to guide the Bank s work at the country level in most cases not surprising considering the lack of ownership of AAP among staff and managers and inadequate mechanisms for holding them accountable for its implementation. Although improving the results orientation of the Bank assistance was a stated goal of the AAP, the Plan itself had a poorly articulated results framework. Even though a detailed results frame might not have been practical at the regional level, the links among activities, outputs, and outcomes needed to be more robust. The weaknesses of the results framework were accentuated by the absence of a functioning monitoring system to track progress as a basis for establishing staff and managerial accountabilities for implementation and results, and to draw lessons for the future. 3 The AAP could also have been a useful management tool had it been used to reexamine the Africa Region s business practices to help meet the increased expectations of the donor community. In particular, the AAP did not reflect adequately on the long-standing problem of the weak performance of Bank-supported projects and programs in the Africa Region and the changes needed to address that problem. The implications of more intensive engagement in fragile and conflictaffected states, greater harmonization with other partners, and the rapid growth of trust-funded activities should have also received more attention in the AAP. A critical look at the costs and benefits of decentralization relative to the AAP agenda would also have been helpful. Although nominally the AAP was a WBG plan, in reality it was a Bank-driven initiative with very limited IFC and MIGA involvement in its preparation and implementation. IFC s business targets for the region were not developed with reference to the AAP, and MIGA s fiscal strategy and business plans were likewise developed without reference to the AAP, as was its fiscal strategy. The AAP missed the opportunity to lead a process of scaling up of aid to Africa as per the mandate given to the WBG by the international community at Gleneagles. The AAP did not prove to be a suitable platform around which to mobilize increased financial support for Africa to meet that historic challenge. Achievement of AAP Objectives Overall trends in Bank Group support to the Africa Region are in the right direction. The Bank Group did well in scaling up its support to Africa during fiscal and in adapting its products to the diverse needs of its clients. The Bank also did well in aligning its support to the priority needs of the region, including greater attention to infrastructure and agriculture, to fragile states, and to regional integration. Even as the process of the AAP is not seen to have succeeded in promoting these directions, some of the content of the AAP, including the biennial updates, reinforced those shifts. These positive changes were necessary but not sufficient for improving results for the Bank-supported programs. Although it is too early to make a definitive judgment, available evaluation data suggest that the Bank has not succeeded in improving the development outcomes of its support to Africa when measured against stated objectives. The share of AFR projects with satisfactory outcomes at exit remained at about 72 percent by commitment levels and 65 percent by number of projects compared to the AAP target of 80 percent. Over the past five years, the WBG substantially increased its financial and analytical activities in support of the accelerated growth agenda. Private sector-led growth in Africa since 2005 has been positive overall. Positive trends are visible in infrastructure, though poor infrastructure remains a major constraint to development and to the quality of life. Evaluations of closed projects in the past five years paint a highly varied picture of the effectiveness of Bank lending in supporting the

4 drivers of growth. The transport and water supply portfolios have performed well, in contrast to the energy portfolio (only 27 percent success rate for fiscal exits). Agricultural yields increased modestly but well short of the rate envisaged under the AAP. The themes and priorities supporting inclusive and sustainable growth shifted substantially across the three versions of the AAP, in part reflecting lessons of experience. Nevertheless some critical development issues and challenges were not addressed. In particular, the AAP could have been more instrumental in bringing attention to issues concerning reproductive health, social protection and safety nets, the environment, and urban development. The AAP design also paid inadequate attention to the Bank s internal effectiveness, to opportunities for cross-sectoral work, and to the targeting and tracking of benefits among the poor. The poor outcomes for Bank-supported operations (especially in education, environment, and the health, nutrition, and population sector) underline the challenges the Bank and countries face in some key results areas for achievement of the MDGs. The AAP was only partly relevant to the governance and FCS agenda, as it did not take into account sufficiently the lessons of experience and the changing aid architecture for FCS. The AAP design did not meaningfully address the problem of corruption, implement effectively the recommendations of the Capacity Development Task Force, or address adequately the challenges of the FCS. On the positive side, the inclusion of the social accountability agenda was critically important, and also noteworthy was the support for the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative. Taking Africa as a whole, achievements in the AAP areas of governance and public management fell short of what was envisaged. It is important to note, however, the wide variance in results among African countries, which suggests a more nuanced assessment. The Bank seems to have had little impact on governance and public management where the governments did not welcome Bank support, in particular many of the resource-rich countries. In contrast, the Bank seems to have made a positive contribution in countries where it had receptive partners (notably Burundi, Ghana, Liberia, and Tanzania), confirming that institution-intensive reforms can succeed only where government ownership is genuine. The AAP s initial ambitions to significantly advance the results agenda and strengthen aid effectiveness were dropped as areas for management attention in the 2007 AAP, and there was little systematic effort by the Bank to monitor progress thereafter. The magnitude of the scale-up in external support envisioned in the AAP also underwent significant adjustment through its various iterations. The 2005 AAP included an ambitious intention to develop a regional partnership framework as a basis for scaling up external support to Africa. Over time the goal became more modest, and by 2009 the focus of Bank management had shifted to selectively increasing the Bank s own support. The management of partnerships has tended to be ad hoc, contrary to the expectations raised by the 2005 AAP. Major stakeholders client countries, regional institutions, and major development partners in Africa were only sporadically consulted during formulation and monitoring of the AAP. Despite the lack of a systematic and strategic approach to partnerships, most partners interviewed for this evaluation pointed to productive collaboration with the World Bank at the individual country, or sector level, including through collaborative CASs, joint budget support operations, and joint analytical work (notably on public financial management). Most partners also wanted improved strategic coordination at the regional level. Although support to regional integration remained a constant objective of the Bank, the regional integration component of the AAP kept changing. From being a significant component of the growth pillar in the 2005 AAP, it was mostly dropped from the 2007 AAP but put back in 2009 as one of the six strategic themes. Considerable progress was made in scaling up Bank support for regional integration, but the outcomes remain constrained due to continuing weaknesses in regional institutions and inherent complexities of the regional projects and programs. Overall, during the AAP period the World Bank played a positive role in encouraging the adoption of better policies for private sector growth and increasing support for priority areas such as infrastructure, agriculture, and regional integration. The World Bank also made some progress in harmonizing its support with that of other donors and aligning it better with country priorities. The Bank was, however, much less successful in helping strengthen national and regional institutions to lay the foundation for sustainable growth for the future. Lessons The AAP evaluation provides several important lessons, both for the nature and design of regional strategies in general and for the content of the next strategy for the Africa Region. Lessons concerning regional strategies include: Preparation of a regional strategy needs to include clear articulation of the rationale for such a strategy and how it would relate to the CAS process. A regional strategy should guide and complement the country strategies. Primary focus needs to be on regional and sub-regional issues, cross-sectoral synergies and collaboration, and regional public goods that would not be addressed adequately in individual CASs, with the goal being to provide a strategic framework to guide the country strategies instead of attempting to prescribe. While flexibility and adaptation to change are valuable, a strategy ought to be underpinned by a resilient medium-term framework. To promote accountability, the 4

5 rationale for any significant changes in objectives and approaches during implementation need to be explained in a transparent manner. A strategy calls for realistic objectives and targets, recognizing that the WBG and other donors can only facilitate and not control what will actually happen on the ground. The strategy should include a coherent results framework against which progress can be monitored. Such a framework must be backed up by a limited number of key performance indicators capturing overarching objectives and constraints, clearly defined baselines and targets, functioning monitoring arrangements to track progress regularly, and a process for timely follow-up by management on issues raised in progress reports. Strategy formulation needs to be accompanied by adequate attention to implementation aspects, including organizational, human, and budget resource issues together with analysis of tradeoffs and potential risks. This is especially important for cross-sectoral agendas in thematic areas such as nutrition, environment, gender, regional integration, and capacity development, where responsibilities cut across usual organizational boundaries within the WBG (and in the client countries). Not all strategies warrant a World Bank Group-wide scope, nor should regional strategies such as the Africa Action Plan automatically include IFC and MIGA. Where they are included, there must be a coherent vision and clear articulation of the role to be played by each of these entities, why their involvement is necessary for reaching the identified goals, and how their participation will add to the overall effectiveness of the WBG. Any proposed intervention must be consistent with the entities business models, instruments, and comparative advantage. The potential benefits of including IFC and MIGA in a World Bank Group-wide regional strategy should be assessed against its added complexity and implementation risks. Finally, in designing a regional strategy, the process is as important as the content. For a strategy to be operationally useful, it is essential that it enjoys the ownership of country clients, other partners and stakeholders, as well as WBG staff. This requires adequate opportunities for consultation and discussion, both to capture knowledge and experience and to promote internalization of the strategy in operational work. Shortterm exigencies should not be allowed to compromise the participatory nature of the strategy formulation. Also emerging from this evaluation are suggestions for a number of preparatory activities and analyses that AFR may wish to consider for strengthening its future strategy for Africa. A critical look at the drivers of the outcomes for WBG-supported operations in Africa leading to actions for improving future performance and delivering sustainable results, especially in HNP, environment and education. Pro-active management of the aid effectiveness agenda, including mechanisms for improved strategic coordination with major development partners, especially the African Development Bank, the European Commission, and the African Union. More creative thinking about how to spur a scale-up in development finance for Africa, including contributions from nontraditional sources. Stepped-up support for regional infrastructure investments in the power and transport sectors to help exploit economies of scale and promote regional connectivity. Adaptations in regional business processes to mainstream multi-donor trust funds into regional work programs, recognizing their rapidly increasing importance for the social sectors and for the FCS in Africa. Revisiting and strengthening AFR s support for capacity development based on a stocktaking of the experience in implementing the recommendation of the Capacity Development Task Force Report over the past five years and, in particular, the 2006 Capacity Development Management Action Plan. Reinforcing further the WBG support for building country statistical and monitoring and evaluation systems to underpin meaningful tracking of development results. 5

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