World Bank endorses new five-year country partnership framework to support inclusive, equitable growth path for Ethiopia

Addis Ababa, June 28, 2017 (FBC) – The Board of Executive Directors yesterday endorsed a new World Bank Group (WBG) five-year Country Partnership Framework (CPF) to support Ethiopia’s development aspirations.

The CPF is informed by extensive consultations with a broad range of stakeholders and is in line with priorities outlined in the country’s Growth and Transformation Plan II (GTP-II), according to a press release by the Bank.

Over the past decade, Ethiopia has achieved significant progress in economic, social and human development: The poverty rate has declined from 55 percent in 2000 to 34 percent in 2011.

Real GDP growth has averaged 10.5 percent per year between 2003 and 2015, and life expectancy rose from 52 to 65 years.

Ethiopia has also achieved a number of the Millennium Development Goals. However, despite impressive milestones, significant challenges remain.

The CPF strives to assist Ethiopia in forging a more inclusive and sustainable growth path. Specifically, the CPF will help promote structural and economic transformation through increased productivity in both rural and urban areas by focusing on basic education, increasing access to markets and creating job opportunities for the youth.

It is also designed to help build resilience and inclusiveness (including gender equality) by improving safety nets, investing in productive landscapes, and focusing on the Early Years agenda.

The CPF will also support institutional accountability and assist in combating corruption by focusing on improving governance and promoting social accountability.

“The CPF intensifies our support for poverty reduction in Ethiopia and seeks to address key challenges facing the country. Among other things, our interventions will support increased citizen engagement, greater resilience to the effects of climate change, more inclusive growth, and youth employment,” said Carolyn Turk, World Bank Country Director for Ethiopia.

The private sector is expected to be a key contributor to Ethiopia’s future development, and the CPF envisages prominent roles for the International Finance Corporation (IFC) as well as the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), World Bank Group institutions that focus exclusively on the private sector.

“In the past, Ethiopia’s development model was based on public investment but there are increasing needs and opportunities to unlock the potential of the private sector. IFC’s strategy is to create markets and mobilize private capital, including offering products aimed at de-risking investments to make more investment possible,’’ said Adamou Labara, Country Manager for IFC in Ethiopia.

This CPF aims to tackle challenges to Ethiopia’s quest to achieve lower middle-income status by 2025. In spite of the progress achieved over the past decade, there are still intra-regional disparities in resource endowments and access to services, with pockets of poverty even in relatively well-off areas of the country.

Using a spatial approach, efforts will be made to ensure that all regions and people have access to the full range of quality services, from health and education to water supply.

Citizen engagement tools (community scorecards, citizen report cards, participatory budgeting) have already proven to be successful in existing WBG financed programs and will be scaled up under the CPF, as part of efforts to improve governance and accountability.

The CPF also marks a departure from the past by placing a greater emphasis on measuring results and the impact of WBG’s interventions.

In the energy sector, the aim is to double the number of people with access to electricity; in education, the goal is to achieve better learning outcomes for girls (and achieve gender parity); in agriculture, increasing the proportion of cereal/pulses produced by female-headed households by 60 percent by 2020.