World Bank uses blockchain to shine light on project spending

GlobalMarkets, is part of the Delinian Group, DELINIAN (GLOBALCAPITAL) LIMITED, 4 Bouverie Street, London, EC4Y 8AX, Registered in England & Wales, Company number 15236213

Copyright © DELINIAN (GLOBALCAPITAL) LIMITED and its affiliated companies 2025

Accessibility | Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Modern Slavery Statement | Event Participant Terms & Conditions

World Bank uses blockchain to shine light on project spending

Januš Kizenevič

World Bank CFO explains how it is using distributed ledger to enhance transparency and accountability

The World Bank is aiming to put 250 projects on a blockchain-based tool to make funds more traceable and help client countries improve transparency in public finances, the World Bank Group’s chief financial officer has told GlobalMarkets.

Called FundsChain, the new tracking tool has been successfully tested in 13 projects in 10 countries. It will now be scaled up by the end of the Bank’s current fiscal year in June 2026. It makes the Bank the first multilateral development lender to use a blockchain system for tracking funds.

“The beauty of this is that once you upload your documents and you put your records there, it’s there for everyone to see. It’s completely transparent, it is immutable,” Anshula Kant told GlobalMarkets.

“We are scaling up — 250 in terms of number and 70% of our project financing,” she said. “It’s not that the remaining projects we don’t want to cover. The remaining ones are different types of lending instruments which are not amenable to this kind of documentation.”

Early adopters include the Philippines, where it was used for the World Bank’s $500m Metro Manila Flood Management Project to improve infrastructure and reduce flood risks.

In Bangladesh, it supports the International Development Association’s $600m Bangladesh Resilience, Entrepreneurship and Livelihood Improvement Project, intended to benefit 115,000 individuals in 3,200 villages.

The Bank wants every player engaged in a development project — partners, borrowers, auditors and country recipients — to be able to track how funds are used.

Traditional practices mean borrowers often use manual tracking methods and paper records of payments, leading to inefficiencies for countries and the World Bank. Keeping track of records is important to enable auditors to scrutinise where money has gone and how it has been used, without having to search in multiple places for documents.

By using cryptographic techniques, distributed ledger technology and internet infrastructure, FundsChain’s platform modernises this process with automated record management and provides a tamper-resistant, mobile-accessible monitoring system.

In theory, once information is recorded, it cannot be altered. For example, when a contractor uploads an invoice to the platform and government agencies delay payment, this becomes visible to all stakeholders.

Gift this article