An open letter to Ajay Banga on thirty years of stagnant governance and the need for structural accountability
By Aboubakr Barry
Mr. President,
“When I strive to examine my own conduct… I divide, so to speak, into two persons… The first is the spectator… The second is the agent, the person I properly call myself.”
In 1759, Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, articulated this idea in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith’s “impartial spectator” is the disciplined act of stepping outside oneself to honestly judge one’s own conduct. More than two and a half centuries later, this wisdom remains entirely valid. I write this letter in this spirit—not as an adversary, but as a practitioner who has dedicated his career to public financial management and governance in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, and who believes that the Bank can, and must, do better. The Bank possesses the knowledge and convening power that, combined with willing and determined governments, can concretely improve the lives of our continent’s populations.
The Data Speaks for Itself
The World Bank’s own Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) show that on the four critical dimensions of governance that are most crucial in determining if African governments can mobilize domestic revenues and access global capital markets—control of corruption, rule of law, government effectiveness, and regulatory quality—sub-Saharan Africa has made little progress over nearly three decades, and has even regressed on several dimensions. World Bank disbursements in the region reached $108.5 billion in the sole period FY2018–2024.
The figures are unambiguous. Control of corruption has declined, falling from a percentile rank of 37.7 in 1996 to 33.7 in 2024. Rule of law has dropped from 45.6 to 43.2. Government effectiveness has stagnated without sustainable improvement. Only regulatory quality has recorded a modest gain, from 39.1 to 44.0, over the entire period. The dominant finding is not a spectacular reversal, but a stagnation despite massive investment. The flatness of four curves over nearly three decades of concessional and non-concessional financing raises two fundamental questions for the Bank’s mission: have these interventions built the institutional foundations for autonomous development, and has the debt created by this financing been justified by the value actually delivered on the ground?
Internal Assessment: CPIA Trends
The Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (CPIA) framework is produced annually by World Bank staff and is the primary instrument for calibrating allocations from the International Development Association (IDA). I fully accept it for what it is—it is, after all, the Bank’s own instrument. The WGI, on the other hand, are the best available substitute for the impartial viewer: independent, externally compiled, and globally compared. As shown in Graph 2, both instruments tell the same story: the regional average has remained essentially stable since 2005, with the Public Sector Management and Institutions group—the one most directly linked to fiduciary risk—consistently ranking as the lowest of the four.
The Accountability Deficit
I acknowledge that you have streamlined the Bank’s internal dashboard from 150 indicators to 22. This is a welcome rationalization. But it does not solve the structural problem. The Bank is simultaneously the lender, the project designer, the provider of technical assistance, and the evaluator of its own results. This is a principal-agent problem that no reduction in the number of indicators can solve. After thirty years of stagnant external indicators, the reasonable deduction is not that the Bank needs a more compact internal dashboard. It is that internal dashboards are structurally incapable of producing the accountability demanded by this situation, because the institution has no incentive to report systemic failure.
This is precisely the failure that Adam Smith’s impartial spectator would confront. Examining WGI data alongside CPIA scores used to determine IDA allocations, two questions demand a frank answer:
Is the World Bank burdening sub-Saharan Africa with debt whose carrying cost exceeds the economic value of the funded and implemented projects, in environments of institutional weakness and pervasive corruption that the Bank’s own data documents?
The trend data strongly point in one direction. What remains to be determined is this: what structural changes in incentives—for borrowing governments and for the Bank itself—are necessary to create the conditions for African economies to finance their own development on national and global capital markets?
A Question Waiting for Thirty Years
There is an instructive precedent. In 1995, your predecessor James Wolfensohn attended a dinner hosted by Henri Konan Bédie, President of Côte d’Ivoire. Introduced to a chef who had worked at the Élysée in Paris, Wolfensohn was led to wonder if World Bank money was actually being spent as intended—a moment he recounts in his memoir, A Global Life. This reflection helped place corruption at the center of the development agenda for the first time in the Bank’s history. A generation later, the question remains as valid as it was that evening in Abidjan. Governance data confirms it.
Development economist Stefan Dercon, in Gambling on Development, describes a reality familiar to any practitioner in this field: in many of these countries, two governments actually coexist—the formal government with which the Bank deals, and the elitist political agreement that makes the real allocation decisions, notably by directing project contracts to political allies and insiders. Three decades of WGI data do not contradict this observation. They reinforce it.
Five Proposals
While acknowledging the transition of IDA to exclusively grant financing for its Least Developed Member Countries and the new Results-Focused Program initiative, I propose five concrete measures to change the incentive structure on both sides of the lending relationship, the first of which provides the institutional architecture on which the other four depend.
1. Create an independent external evaluation body, separate from the Bank’s administrative structure, with a mandate to continuously assess whether the Bank’s loans in developing countries generate the development outcomes and institutional capacity gains that justify the debt they create.
Paul Volcker, former Federal Reserve Chairman, referring to a recommendation made by a commission he chaired to examine the integrity of World Bank projects, wrote in his autobiography Keeping At It: “I deeply regret that the World Bank did not pursue the oversight board my group had recommended.” This abandoned mandate should be reactivated. Thirty years of self-reported results against stagnant external indicators do not validate the current model. They argue for external review. The following four operational proposals are credible only if this architecture exists.
2. Directly tie World Bank Group funding to verified improvement in the four governance indicators presented above.
Development financing is fungible: Bank disbursements free up domestic resources for uses unrelated to development. The Bank should enhance its internal procedures to ensure that money is deployed where it will demonstrably serve development. The leverage exists: leaders wish to survive politically and generally want to be perceived as effective; true reform becomes conceivable when they conclude that their political survival demands it.
3. Require, prior to project approval, that the Bank certify the existence of a credible fiduciary system and that the projected economic return of the project is at least equal to its total financing cost—including the sovereign debt service it creates.
This shifts the burden of proof upstream, before commitments are made, rather than after funds are disbursed when accountability becomes difficult to establish.
4. Publish an annual ranking of sub-Saharan African countries according to their fiduciary standards, making this ranking a central element of the Bank’s flagship publications.
Finance ministers operate in a regional peer environment—they attend the same summits, sit on the same boards, and vie for the same investor attention. Transparent public ranking creates accountability that is harder to ignore than private bilateral conversation: no minister wants to be seen by peers as presiding over a system incapable of accounting for public resources. Countries at the bottom of the ranking face reputational pressure to act; those at the top have an interest in maintaining their position, which will incentivize ministers and assist them in their efforts to improve fiduciary standards at home. This kind of transparency does not require new instruments—it requires the political will to use what the Bank already produces.
5. When the Bank certifies a project as viable and that certification proves incorrect, it should bear a defined portion of the cost.
As Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim observed: for every bad borrower, there is a bad lender. The poor citizens of sub-Saharan Africa should not be the only ones to bear the consequences of bad lending decisions. The mechanism could take the form of fee reductions, discounts on administrative charges, or contributions to a national remediation fund. This does not threaten the Bank’s preferred creditor status, which governs repayment priority in cases of sovereign distress—not revenues from fees on underperforming projects. And if the prospect of shared loss strengthens the quality of certification upstream, a stronger portfolio results—which precisely protects the Bank’s rating.
A Final Note of Realism
I have no illusions about institutional inertia. But the cost of inaction is not abstract. If governance scores across sub-Saharan Africa essentially resemble in ten years what they are today—as they have been, with no significant change, since 1996—the Bank will have deployed a significant new tranche of capital on stagnant institutional foundations, and a new generation of Africans will serve the debt of projects that have not transformed their lives.
The impartial viewer asks us to judge conduct not as we wish it to be perceived, but as it truly is. This honest assessment is both overdue and within your power to initiate, Mr. Banga. I hope these reflections merit some consideration.
About Aboubakr Kaira Barry, CFA
Aboubakr Kaira Barry, CFA, is Managing Director of Results Associates and has devoted over twenty years to reforming public financial management in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East.
