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The Bank’s shareholders and Management have long recognized the importance of placing individual Bank activities in an overall strategic context – for a sector or a country. Country Assistance Strategies (CASs) provide Bank Management and the Board with an indicative business plan for the delivery of Bank services over a particular period of time (most frequently four years), to support the achievement of specific development results by the country's authorities.
The 2009 CAS Retrospective analyzes the evolution of the CAS over the past few years, takes stock of current practices and summarizes future developments. This CAS Retrospective is the first since 2005, when the Bank made several changes in the CAS architecture - it introduced the Results-Based CAS; the CAS Progress Report (CASPR), prepared at the midpoint of CAS implementation; the CAS Completion Report (CASCR), prepared at the end of implementation and validated by IEG to promote learning for the preparation of the next CAS; and the Interim Strategy Note (ISN) for situations when the Bank's engagement in the country is uncertain or insufficient information is available for a new CAS.
The principal finding of the CAS Retrospective is that current CAS architecture is appropriate and, by and large, has served the Bank and its clients well. It is sufficiently flexible and robust to accommodate programming for an increasingly diverse set of Bank clients, ranging from upper-end middle income countries to post-conflict states. Future work will focus on largely strengthening some of the components of this architecture: Strengthening the results frameworks in CASs, especially in middle-income and fragile/conflict-affected countries. In particular, these frameworks need to be linked to the outcomes the Bank is to be held accountable for, not higher-level development outcomes. Enhancing the content of CASPRs and CASCRs to adapt to changing country and global circumstances and to improve CAS design and implementation. For the CASCR, there are issues about the timing: need to be sure the work is done before the preparation of the new CAS, since the whole point is to inform that preparation. Clearly differentiating CAS documents from CAS preparation processes. After a lot of experience on collaborative CASs (which are strategies prepared with those of other donors), the evidence is that producing a joint CAS document with other donors entails high transactions costs. However, the collaborative process leading to that document brings a lot of benefits. The lesson: more collaboration efforts in country strategy work and less on producing joint documents. Continue strengthening the country-level collaboration within the World Bank Group.
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