Shigeo Katsu,
Regional Vice President,
Europe and Central Asia,
World Bank

Dear Colleagues,

It gives me great pleasure to announce the winners of the First Annual "Improving the Lives of People in ECA" Competition.
We received about 60 proposals covering a wide variety of ECA's work — knowledge products, DPLs, investment projects, M&E work — and almost all subsectors and countries. Judges on the panel, from within ECA and outside the Region, all agreed that all the submissions were excellent, even though the quality of the write-ups to support the proposals was uneven. However, this is more an issue with our side: this being the first time, we may not have gotten the templates right. We will be more specific next year. But it simply was not possible to include every proposal — we aimed for about 15 winners. Choosing the best among the best presented a real challenge for the jury. We ended up going beyond our target, awarding 19 prizes for a total of 22 activities. I appreciate that there may be dissent, especially from those teams that have lost out this time around. We will try to provide feedback so that hopefully next year these nominations will be selected. The winning entries showcase results, real impact, achieved with our support as well as solid work to monitor and evaluate those results. They illustrate the value of innovation, solid implementation, and sustainability.

The winners are listed below in alphabetical order by country. Beside them, we have noted the strategic pillars to which each one contributes:

• 1 = Poor Countries
• 2 = Fragile and Conflict Affected Countries
• 3 = Middle Income Countries
• 4 = Global Public Goods
• 5 = Knowledge and Learning