The World Bank is talking to other multilateral development banks about its new Scorecard for measuring the impact of its investments, and hoping they will agree to use it as a standardised system.
The intention is “having everybody measuring the same way,” said Lisandro Martin, director of the WBG’s outcomes department. “It will give us a possibility to really understand what the result of our interventions is, vis-à-vis the size of the problem.”
Martin said he hoped to have a good indication of which other MDBs “interested and willing to go with us” by the Spring Meetings in April.
Launched in April 2024, the Scorecard tracks the outcome of World Bank Group operations according to 22 indicators, radically slimmed down from its previous framework of 153 measures.
“There is a really big mistake among people that have not done a lot of thinking on performance management,” said Martin — “the belief that the more indicators you have, the more accountable you make an institution. If you have 150 and somebody asks you ‘is the World Bank Group doing well?’ I can say ‘I’m doing great in 10, poor in 10. I don’t have data for 120.’ This is how it goes. When you have 22 you have a very clear picture of whether we’re making a contribution or not. So I’m very much an advocate — and Ajay [Banga, WBG president] himself has a very strong vision — that this should be maintained within a limited set of indicators to maintain the power of the Scorecard.”
The final piece of the Scorecard, which Martin is consulting on, is a new indicator of how WBG operations create “better jobs”. It will be unveiled at the Spring Meetings.
The aim is to go beyond counting how many jobs are created, to identify when people move into better paid work.
“This Scorecard overall gives you many avenues to understand, in a more nuanced manner, how the World Bank Group actually contributes to jobs,” Martin said.
His team has developed a model that calculates how much more labour income has been created as a result of its operations and divides that by the average wage in that sector in the country.
Precise measurement
Overall, the Scorecard is meant to measure results in a “more precise” manner, Martin said. “Measurement is a question of precision, but most importantly, an issue of direction.”
He pointed to the WBG’s target to help 500m people gain access to social safety nets by 2030. “We bring analytics to the team and say, ‘OK, are we on track to deliver on our promises?’” he said.
He found 30% of WBG operations were delivering results “significantly faster” than the rest. Further analysis found the reason was using new technologies to digitalise payments. “We had a cold conversation across the institution on how those techniques could be brought to the rest of the operations, so that the urgency of results could be accelerated,” Martin said.
The new measure will contribute to the target of reducing the jobs deficit that Banga has set, and which Martin described as the Bank’s “north star”. The Bank estimates 1.2bn people in emerging economies will reach working age over the next decade, but that just 420m jobs will be generated.
Annalisa Prizzon, a research fellow at the thinktank ODI Global, said finance ministry officials had told her they liked the Scorecard because it helped them make a case for the impact of the money they had borrowed from the World Bank, and show accountability to their citizens.
“The Scorecard is not only an instrument to process the impact of shareholder contributions, but also a tool for accountability from the perspective of the borrowing countries,” she told GlobalMarkets. “The Scorecard is also about accountability of the institutions. The way the Scorecard reflects the kind of priorities and the strategic directions of the World Bank is highly aligned with that.”