This article appeared originally in Today, the daily E-magazine for World Bank staff. March 9, 2005—March 11 marks the 50th Anniversary of the World Bank Institute (WBI) formerly known as the Economic Development Institute (EDI). This story charts the evolution of EDI/WBI and highlights its current strategy.
“Tonight’s speaker, on the topic of Women in Development, is anthropologist Margaret Mead.”
So went the invitation circulated to the members of one of the early seminars of the Economic Development Institute (EDI), forerunner of the World Bank Institute (WBI). The 20 senior developing-country officials who heard Margaret Mead speak that night in the former Washington home of the World Bank’s founding president were students in EDI’s six-month-long “general course on economic development,” which was taught by a faculty of three, including EDI’s founding director, Sir Alec Cairncross.
To get to that night, Cairncross had had to convince a skeptical Dag Hammarskjold to support the new institute as a means of marshalling funds from the Ford and Rockefeller foundations. His winning argument was that EDI’s economists would not dispense top-down teaching; instead, EDI would be a community of diverse participants “who would learn from each other more than they could learn from universities.”
EDI’s first course included modules on “the meaning and measurement of development,” “market mechanisms and administrative controls,” and “the historical evolution of underdeveloped countries.” In addition to Mead, the visiting faculty included a handful of Nobel laureates—among them Sir Arthur Lewis, who’s Theory of Economic Development became an EDI textbook, and Jan Tinbergen, whose Design of Development is one of several WBI bestsellers. More laureates graced EDI’s “universities advisory committee,” the forerunner to today’s WBI external advisory committee.
Today’s institute (EDI became WBI in 1999) reaches nearly 80,000 people a year with more than 1,000 multi-sectoral learning programs and activities, most developed in accordance with prior diagnostics and delivered in-country using appropriate blends of learning technologies. In addition to structured courses, WBI each day disseminates through its Web site the digital equivalent of 4,000 books, serves more than 5,000 visitors, and fulfills 7,000 requests for Web casts through B-Span. WBI in its role as an innovator has incubated Global Development Learning Network, World Links, African Virtual University, Development Forum, Global Links to mention a few.
Some characteristics of today’s WBI are rooted in its past—notably the growing integration of the institute’s work with that of the Bank as a whole. That process of integration is mirrored in the steady increase in the share of WBI programs delivered in country and the gradual expansion of the institute’s alumni to include midlevel officials, parliamentarians, civil society, media, youth, and academics. Today, WBI allocates 50 percent of its program budget to developing the capacity of 33 focus countries selected in collaboration with the Bank’s Regions.
WBI has now embedded a “capacity” component in 19 Country Assistance Strategies. External partners, including a growing number of in-country educational institutions and service providers, contribute to program development and delivery. Both practices continue a tradition of training trainers that emerged at WBI in the early 1980s.
Why capacity development instead of training? In 2002 the Monterrey Conference on Financing for Development stressed the need to build country-owned capacity to ensure sustained growth and change. Capacity—the ability of individuals, institutions and societies to solve problems, make informed choices, order their priorities and plan their futures—is at the heart of the international consensus on achieving the Millennium Development Goals. As a result, WBI reshaped it strategy to respond to specific country needs -- moving from a training institute to a capacity development institute expanding its array of products and services, and becoming much more closely aligned with Bank and Regional priorities.
In other ways, today’s WBI is decidedly new. Setting aside the obvious element of digital technology, which has vastly extended the institute’s reach, WBI has moved both upstream and down in the learning process, without abandoning the production of core courses and bestsellers on a variety of cross-sectoral themes in development.
WBI has developed sophisticated, formal diagnostic instruments to assess gaps in knowledge, capacity and governance at the national and subnational levels. WBI’s national governance diagnostics program, for example, is being used for action learning programs in around 30 countries. Its Country Capacity Needs Assessment makes capacity-building programs more effective by pinpointing gaps to be filled and its Knowledge Assessment helps countries develop strategies to spur economic growth and reduce poverty.
Broad engagement in global learning processes and an extensive technological infrastructure enable WBI to fulfill the intimate mission that it embraced a half century ago: facilitating the sharing of knowledge among development practitioners. That essential mission was the centerpiece of the May 2004 Shanghai conference and global learning process on scaling up poverty reduction (http://www.worldbank.org/wbi/reducingpoverty/), an event produced by WBI, where practitioners studied a hundred varied cases of development to identify what works and what doesn't in scaling up poverty reduction. This year-long learning process, where the World Bank acted as a facilitator, encouraged cross country learning through field visits and dialogues and brought in a “new approach” to learning by doing.
 | Frannie Leautier |
Sir Alec Cairncross and Dag Hammarskjold would have approved of the objective and the learning principles used in the Shanghai process, but they could not have predicted the scale of diffusion of the results. To date, the lessons of Shanghai have been shared with 250,000 people through Web sites, 15 million through print media, and 1.6 billion through television documentaries. From local to global, and back. Frannie Leautier, WBI Vice President talked about the institute at the February Corporate Day. Click here for more on WBI’s history.
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