Over the last couple of months you may have noticed that we have published multiple tender announcements and opportunities on our blog, both under the ‘eConsultant2’ tab and the ‘Projects’ tab. You might be wondering, what is the difference? The difference between the opportunities published relates to the procuring entity. The Corporate Procurement (eConsultant2) is procured by the 
World Bank itself, while Operational Procurement (Projects) is procured by the borrowing countries. With operational procurement, the role of the World Bank is limited to oversight and issuing a ‘no objection’ – the World Bank has an oversight role in this but does not run the procurement process. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Zakendoen
Sahel Women’s Empowerment and Demographics Project
The development objective of the Sahel Women’s Empowerment and Demographic Dividend Project for Africa is to increase women and adolescent girls’ empowerment and their access to quality reproductive, child, and maternal health services in selected areas of the participating countries, including the recipients territory, and to improve regional knowledge generation and sharing as well as regional capacity and coordination. Continue reading
Royal HaskoningDHV wins major contract coastal protection Bangladesh
Source: Press release by Royal HaskoningDHV.
International engineering and project management consultancy Royal HaskoningDHV has signed a €10.5 million contract with the Bangladesh Water Development Board for engineering consultancy services to protect Bangladesh’s vulnerable coastal zone, home to millions of people.
Health Systems Strengthening – Democratic Republic of Congo
The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is one of Africa’s most rapidly growing economies. Since 2010 economic growth has exceeded the average for Sub-Saharan Africa by two percentage points, projected to reach over 10% growth in 2015. However, the DRC has some of the worst health and nutrition indicators in the world and is ranked last (#187) in the 2013 Human Development Report. As such, the DRC is not on track to achieve any of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), especially those related to Maternal and Child Health.
The higher level objective to 
which this project would contribute is to increase efficiency and effectiveness in the health system in order to improve human development outcomes. Improvements in efficiency and effectiveness, in turn, should boost confidence in these systems and may lead to an increase in overall investment in the social sectors.
Development Objective
The proposed project development objective is to improve utilization and quality of maternal and child health services in targeted areas.
The IFC
The World Bank Group, other than providing IDA & IBRD financing to bor
rowing governments, also has three other pillars. These are the IFC, MIGA and the ICSID. The activities by the MIGA were explained in an earlier post, in this article we are focusing on the International Finance Corporation ( IFC ), the private sector pillar of the WBG. For the first time in the history of the World Bank Group the IFC was the pillar with the biggest budget, financing for more than $22 billion in fiscal year 2014.
The IFC provides financial support through loans and equity financing to its clients and additionally provide advice to unlock private sector investment. For a project to be eligible for IFC support a number of criteria must be met. The project must be located in a developing country that is a member of the IFC, active in the private sector, be technically sound, have good prospects of being profitable, benefit the local economy and satisfy environmental and social standards.
Capacity Building Sanitation Plan – Vietnam
The development objective of the TA is to support the Can Tho City Peoples’ Committee and the City’s Department of Construction in implementing the poor-inclusive City Sanitation Plan by providing expertise to develop curricula, guidelines and training programs to increase implementation capacity for the Plan.
Through an assessment of current and future demand for human resources competencies in sanitation in Can Tho the TA will establish a framework and program for delivering capacity building to the city agencies responsible for the planning, coordination and implementation of sanitation services in the city’s urban, peri-urban and rural areas.
See full tender here: Capacity Building Sanitation Plan – Vietnam
Expression of Interest Deadline: 09 February 2015
The Country Partnership Framework (CPF)
In one of our factsheets posted on this blog we explain the project
cycle, this post will dive deeper into what the Country Assistance Strategy is and what it means for you. The project cycle starts with the formulation of a Country Assistance Strategy (CAS) or Country Partnership Strategy (CPS). This CAS / CPS provides a comprehensive diagnosis of the challenges of project development and identifies the areas the World Bank can have the biggest impact on poverty reduction.
In 2013 a new World Bank Group Corporate Strategy was announced. This lead to the establishment of Global Practices and Cross-Cutting Solution Areas this past July; something we also reported on earlier. After the reorganization the CAS / CPF was replaced by a new strategic country development document, now called the Country Partnership Framework (CPF). From 2015 onwards all strategic country development documents will be created according to the new CPF format.
Like the former CAS / CPS, the CPF provides the reader with borrowing countries development objectives, that it wants to achieve with the help of the World Bank. It also includes a result chain of how these objectives will contribute to the Bank’s twin goals of reducing absolute poverty and boosting shared prosperity. Additionally, the CPF focuses on specific sectors where the Bank plans to identify broader objectives.
The CPF will be based on a Systemic Country Diagnostic (SCD) document, which contains data that provides analysis and grounding for determining the opportunities and constraints in a country. The SCD together with the local government’s national development plan will be used to initiate a discussion about priority areas and where the Bank’s added value could be utilized.
The CPF is drafted by the World Bank country team residing in Washington DC, in cooperation with the regional or country office. Hereafter it must be signed off by the Regional Vice President and the Managing Director and will then be sent to the Bank’s Board of Directors for discussion and approval.
During the process of gathering data for the SCD and drafting the CPF the Bank often consults with the various stakeholders, including the private sector, civil society and possible other institutions like for example the foreign embassies. Although it is not expected that the World Bank actively engages with a lot of companies in the process of drafting a CPF, overall visions of these companies on the potential development of the borrowing countries can be taken in account.
In conclusion, the CPF is a strategic vision document which outlines the Bank’s strategy concerning activities with the borrowing countries. It will identify certain key sectors that are critical for the borrowing country’s development. As the CPF is sometimes subject to stakeholder consultations and external input, it would beneficial for a company to be involved in the process. Either way examining the CPF closely will give the company a good idea of the future direction of the WBG in the country.
Health Insurance Subsidy Process Evaluation – Kenya
The African Health Markets for Equity (AHME) is a five-year project that aims to improve health outcomes through the provision of quality private sector health care targeting the poor in Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana. In Kenya, the AHME project is supporting the National Hospital Insurance Fund (NHIF) to design, test, and scale-up the Health Insurance Subsidy Program (HISP) that will serve as a mechanism for the Government of Kenya to subsidize NHIF insurance cover for the poorest households in Kenya.
To supplement a quantitative impact evaluation of the programme, the NHIF plans to carry out a process evaluation. The aim of the process evaluation is to assess programme implementation and provide information that will help implementers determine the degree to which the HISP intervention was implemented as planned (implementation fidelity).
Going local: a mission to Senegal and Ghana
By Daan Marks, advisor to the Dutch Executive Director at the World Bank
Traveling always makes me reflect on my life and 
surroundings. When I travel to Belgium (which is not too often), I realize that the Dutch transportation system is actually pretty good. Now that I live in the US, I have come to realize how efficient the Dutch public sector actually is. Last September I traveled to Senegal and Ghana and it made me realize how privileged I am to have a toilet. It is just a different dimension. The face of extreme poverty, and inequality, is obviously confronting. It is also frustrating to see that mismanagement and corruption put a halt on much needed social and economic development.
The economic perspective
Recent GDP figures show that the economies of Sub-Saharan Africa are generally on the rise (or ‘Africa rising’, as some have dubbed it). I think this picture is somewhat misleading. Given the very low starting point and rampant population growth, African countries need these high growth rates to raise living standards above subsistence levels, while absorbing the growing labor force. My guess is that GDP per capita growth is much less impressive, and that figures on GDP per worker do not show significant productivity growth. Simultaneously, the challenges remain immense: poverty figures are still shockingly high in many countries, the outbreak of Ebola shows the lack of capacity in the poorest countries, conflict and fragility continue to hamper economic development in Mali, Central African Republic and South Sudan and uneven growth and therefore rising inequality are leading to increased social instability.
Procurement Review Consultations
Tuesday, November 18, the World Bank Procurement Team visited the Netherlands to discuss the progress being made with the Procurement Review. Now in its last stages, the procurement review seeks to update the procurement policy of the World Bank, which applies to countries who borrow resources from the World Bank. This was the third time the team visited the Netherlands, and the new policy will be presented for approval to the Board of Directors in January 2015. This was the last time both the Netherlands public and private sector were able to provide input. Continue reading
Netherlands for the World Bank 
You must be logged in to post a comment.