World Bank Institute in East Asia and the Pacific

Demand from the governments and other local counterparts in East Asia and the Pacific (EAP) for capacity building support remained high, and WBI in response provided a broad capacity building program for the region in FY06 comprising a range of learning events and select technical assistance programs.

Over 150 activities were carried out and directly reached an estimated 15,000 people and a much wider secondary audience (through activities carried out by WBI sponsored training-of-trainers, media reporting of events, changes in institutions triggered by learning and new insights, etc). The core of the FY06 EAP program was made up by the EAP focus country program covering the same six countries as during the previous year and included roughly two thirds of all activities. This was complemented by a regional program that allowed participants from non-focus countries to take part in either activities designed for two or more countries or in extensions of the focus country activities. A limited number of additional country specific events were offered in response to special requests, mainly in Cambodia, and participants from EAP also took part in several global learning events organized by WBI.

Read More About: China | Indonesia  | Lao PDR  | Philippines

As demand from local counterparts remained high, WBI increasingly relied on the EAP Country Management Units and other EAP staff to reconcile requests with available budgets and to shape the scope and content of the program. A formal consultation process helped design the focus country program while informal contacts between WBI and EAP sector staff guided the regional and other ad-hoc activities:

Concentration around fewer themes
As a result of the closer consultations and integration with EAP’s overall assistance program, activities became further consolidated and focused on fewer programs but in greater depth. The focus country program comprised 33 broad activity clusters with, on average, three activities delivered for each cluster. This move away from stand-alone events in favor of several events provided around larger programs is a welcome development as a continued presence and a sequence of events are associated with better results and deeper impact.

Consistency over time
Continuation over time is another emerging feature of the focus country program. In response to the preferences expressed by EAP most of the FY06 programs were continuations of the FY05 programs. This was endorsed by the finding that the best results are brought about when the same staff works on the same issues with the same counterparts in the countries for a prolonged period of time, i.e. over several fiscal years.

The sectoral and thematic composition of the program mainly remained the same as during the previous year. Activities linked to governance and public sector management remained the dominant feature comprising about half of all events and was roughly equally split between central (poverty, fiscal management, parliament) and local (urban management, local and regional level fiscal management) level activities. About 20 percent of the program was linked to private sector development aspects, including investment climate, trade and financial sector issues, and another 20 percent focused on environmental aspects (including institutional aspects of environmental management as well as urban and water sector management issues), most of which in China. The remaining 10 percent dealt with social sector issues, mainly in the health sector but also in the areas of education and social protection.

Changes in response to country needs
Within the overall stable sectoral composition of the program some changes took place response to different needs in different countries:

Within the governance focused activities, a larger share of activities than before was geared towards capacity building for implementation of decentralization policies and for support to parliament. This included Indonesia where the decentralization effort is the policy cornerstone for building post-East Asia financial crisis stability and growth. Similarly support for decentralization and local government grew in the Philippines as a means to underpin the overall Bank assistance objective to improve the country’s poor development outcomes through local level mobilization of its rich human resource base.

To further promote continuity and consistency, the traditional training-focused activities were complemented by more comprehensive technical assistance programs in three countries. In Indonesia, a field based WBI staff member focused the work around stock taking and development of a framework for local government capacity training through a mix of analytical work and workshops delivered by Washington based staff. Similarly in Lao PDR a comprehensive program was delivered focusing on strengthening of the main civil service training institute, NOSPA, and on capacity needs associated with the implementation of the PRSP.  In Vietnam, day-to-day assistance provided to the Government team working to enhance implementation performance of ODA funded activities was complemented by an international workshop on project selection and management.

Several countries, especially the large middle-income ones, increasingly asked for access to international best practices and for WBI to facilitate exchange of knowledge and experience between foreign and local practitioners to allow participants to assess to what extent international experiences can be drawn upon to further development in their own countries. Two peer-to-peer knowledge exchange events (in China and Vietnam) were organized during the year and many of the other learning activities incorporated components of practitioners exchanging views as a complement to conventional training activities.

Demand for capacity building in China focused on environmental issues as years of high economic growth is putting pressure on the environment, and on issues related to modernization of the various aspects of public sector management (both general administration and sector specific aspects, including the social areas) to help the public sector keep up with the demands of the rapidly growing economy. In Indonesia and the Philippines demand remained high for capacity building related to the decentralization efforts, with the overall issue of how to ensure adequate strengthening at local levels proving to be a hard problem to solve. Vietnam and Lao PDR remained interested in traditional and mainstreamed learning events in areas of public administration and environmental management. The Thailand program retained its focus on private-public partnerships (PPP) in infrastructure projects, on support to parliament and on decentralization. Here the PPP work took on special importance as the country announced a major infrastructure investment package as it resuming public sector investments after several years of economic recovery.

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The integration of a system of 14 distance learning centers (DLC) throughout China into the overall WBI supported program is a good example of how modern technology can be employed to support capacity building and learning. During FY06 over 6,000 participants benefited from 26 major DLC events ranging from lectures on public sector reform for 55 sites and over 2,000 participants using the Tsinghua University network to smaller events on topics such as trade, urban planning, investment climate issues, health and the environment. The use of this technology enabled exchanges with participants in Japan, Korea, Thailand, and other countries in Asia, Europe and the Americas and also permitted otherwise hard-to-reach groups in remote areas of China to take part.

In response to clients’ increased interest in peer-peer learning WBI supported a senior level event in China. At senior level, several minister-level international participants shared their thoughts about how the various aspects of public administrative reform can and should be carried out both at central, sector and local level. Some 130 Chinese participants, mainly department heads and deputies from a broad array of government agencies participated in a two day event where international and Chinese presenters took turns sharing their experiences and ideas with the audience. Participants benefited from insights into topics such as the use of private sector participation in education in Bangladesh, how Russia managed administrative reforms during transition and how Sweden implemented public sector reforms in the mid 1990s.

Government and donors in both countries have launched initiatives to support capacity building among central and local governments to support implementation of decentralization and of local level service delivery. WBI together with EAP staff worked to put in place systems for learning using local institutions and with WBI helping to provide design and content and funding for activities. Different from the traditional workshop-focused training events, WBI here plays the role of facilitator and wholesale level supporter.

WBI’s continued support for the Lao PDR’s NOSPA civil service training institute with several events during FY on civil service training and PRSP implementation is a good example of support to strengthen an institution in a poor country coping with several mainstream development issues. Learning events during FY06 included several workshops and seminars about economic analysis and evaluation and about costing and prioritization strategies for the PRSP. In addition WBI brokered a collaboration program between the Korean Development Institute and NOSPA under which several activities and exchanges have taken place.