Engaging Parliamentarians in the Fight Against Poverty

One of the key objectives of EXT is to use communications to help increase the effectiveness of World Bank operations and to support the formation of an engaged, informed and motivated global staff community.

This is exactly what this publication is about. World Bank engagement with legislators is still relatively new and is currently done in an ad hoc way. This guide is a collective work compiling experience Bank wide. It is an attempt to come up with useful tools and responses on how best to engage legislators as agents for change and advocates for development. 

It is indeed crucial to engage effectively with Parliamentarians. Legislators are elected representatives of people; they have received the mandate to speak on behalf of the poor who benefit from World Bank programs. Parliamentarians are not only influential as contributors to the development debate, as legislators and budget makers, they can champion social and economic reforms and advocate pro-poor policies.

The EXT Parliamentary team, with the support of COMMNET, has been facilitating discussion and gathering information through a series of video conferences connecting a wide number of Bank colleagues in field offices, collecting best practices, lessons from experiences, and looking at what can be replicated and what is specific to each country.

In that respect, the creation of the Parliamentary Network on the World Bank (PNoWB) is an important step forward and represents an innovative model of outreach and engagement. Dozen of field offices across the world are structuring their dialogue with parliamentarians through the network and its regional and/ or local chapters. The program of field visits has allowed parliamentarians from more than 50 countries to get a better sense of Bank's operations. Its annual conference has become the Grand Rendez Vous where Heads of multilateral and bilateral agencies as well as legislators can meet and create a unique platform of policy dialogue. All this contributes tremendously to strengthen the Bank's accountability and transparency.

We hope you will find this material useful to you. This guide is a work in progress. We welcome your feedback as we will continue to gather experiences and updates.