World Bank Group staff and stakeholders will be watching closely to see the effects of its One World Bank Group integration policy, which the organisation’s president Ajay Banga is pushing to its conclusion during this financial year.
Combining functions across the Bank’s five entities began soon after Banga arrived as president in 2023, but has accelerated in recent weeks, with a major announcement just before the Annual Meetings.
The five bodies will all remain legally separate, with their own balance sheets, accounts and governance — and those that issue debt will continue to do so under their own names. But teams who carry out similar functions for the different entities will be merged.
GlobalCapital reported on October 9 that the World Bank and International Finance Corp treasury teams were being put together to promote efficiency and sharing of skills.
The intention, Banga said on Friday October 17, is to deliver better results on the ground,.
Back in the spring, he set out plans to decentralise the group’s worldwide operations by relocating regional management from Washington to local hub offices globally, to improve responsiveness to area-specific requirements.
Speaking to the World Bank governors on Friday, Banga said he had “reframed” what the Bank did and how it measured and delivered it, around his agenda of closing the global jobs deficit. “We have worked to move with more speed, with simplicity and substance,” he said, adding that he had consolidated leadership in 40 country offices. “We’re giving clients a single point of contact,” he said.
Some feel they have seen it before. Reorganisations “going right back to the time of [1970s president] Robert McNamara have either failed or there’s passive internal resistance and everybody says, ‘yeah, right’. And after five years, things go back to the way things were done,” said Paul Cadario, a former director of the World Bank, now a distinguished fellow at Toronto University’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.
Banga’s proposal involved joining entities with “completely different cultures”, he thought.
He said the issue was how real the collaboration would be between country economists and social scientists on one hand and the engineers who deal with projects or urban poverty.
“Now that’s not to say what he’s doing is going to fail,” he said. “You have all the constituencies that are important to the Bank: not only the staff, but also the civil society organisations, particularly Europe, which see the bank as an important, if not infallible, linchpin in the fight against global poverty.”
One official said the real value would be in countries of operation. Having joint country representatives would improve coordination between World Bank and IFC staff, while combining the Knowledge Bank across the organisation would make it easier for staff working on any kind of activity to call on the full range of expertise within the Group.
Other benefits could include greater emphasis on areas like local government finance, which might previously have been overlooked, being neither sovereign lending nor private sector.
The reorganisation is not about cutting posts. The official said: “We are very few, compared to what we need to do.”