The World Bank needs urgently its ten best and ten worst list

Sir, if your child received a grade five in an evaluation but you have no idea whether he was being graded on a scale of 5, 7 or 100, and or of how he where in relation to his fellow students, you would not have the faintest idea about how he is really doing. I make this comment with reference to your “Such devoted sisters”, March 1, and where you say that the World Bank “should introduce more rigorous external evaluations of its programmes”.

As a former Executive Director, what I most missed while in the Board was being able to tell after reading through the evaluations of any of the World Bank programs, whether that particular program was among the ten best, the ten worst, or just average. Before the World Bank’s management produces a yearly the ten best and the then worst list there will be no real evaluation and, before that happens the Executive Directors will not really know where they should be scaling up and where they should be correcting or closing down programs, and will waste all their efforts muddling though in the swamp of thousands of average programs. Sir, think of it, it is frightening when an organization does not make explicit what is working and what is not. Try yourself to budget and allocate scarce resources in such circumstances!