IEG Findings and Conclusions. The Bank Group should keep a country engagement model that articulates clear outcome-level objectives and lays out the pathways that will be pursued to achieve them, conducts periodic reviews to take stock of progress, and includes an end-of-cycle review of evidence and learning. These reviews need not be a Board deliverable but should be carried out in time to meaningfully inform course correction and the next strategy. It should discontinue the reliance on results frameworks in their country strategies and midterm and terminal reviews. And it should adopt monitoring, evaluation, and learning plans for its country engagements.

IEG Recommendations. Reform the country-level results system to ensure that it accurately captures the Bank Group’s contribution to country outcomes and usefully informs decision-making on country engagements.

Acceptance by Management. Yes.

Management Response. Management appreciates that in the spirit of the Management Action Record reform, IEG has offered a general prototype of the new monitoring, evaluation, and learning proposal, the details of which would be determined jointly with management to ensure a good “fit” with Bank Group operations.

In the same spirit, management is thus willing to pilot such approaches in a selected number of client countries, representing different client segments. These pilots could be rolled into ongoing efforts to assess how multiple Bank Group activities, in successive Country Partnership Frameworks, contribute to higher-level outcomes, and how such learning can be integrated into the Country Partnership Frameworks process to inform future country programming.