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Africa LEADS [Learn. Adapt. Scale.]

The World Bank’s Western and Central Africa Region (AFW) and the Development Impact (DIME) department are hosting a workshop in Lomé to foster a culture of evidence-based development.

The overlapping crises of climate change, food insecurity, pandemics, and conflict demand a transformative approach to international development. The World Bank Group (WBG) is addressing these challenges through the WBG LEADS [Learn. Adapt. Scale.] Program, a collaborative global initiative led by Development Impact under the Chief Economist, in partnership with Regional Management and the International Finance Corporation (IFC).

The LEADS Program aims to maximize the impact of development investments by embedding high-quality evidence into project design and implementation. The program is built on three core pillars:

  1. Learn: Foster mutual learning through rigorous impact evaluations and research.

  2. Adapt: Enable projects to adopt high-impact solutions informed by evidence.

  3. Scale: Expand proven approaches across regions and globally.

Using real-time data and evidence to resolve real-world challenges, LEADS equips projects with tools to achieve greater and more measurable development outcomes.

Scaling to Western and Central Africa (AFW)

LEADS was successfully launched in Eastern and Southern Africa (AFE) in May 2024. A workshop in Cape Town brought together over 250 participants from 30 projects managing $12.8 billion in investments. The LEADS Program is now scaling to Western and Central Africa (AFW).

The AFW program will start with the AFW LEADS Workshop on May 5–9, 2025, in Lomé, Togo, focusing on advancing regional priorities and delivering evidence-based development solutions.

This invitation-only event will convene pre-selected World Bank and IFC-financed projects, with thematic focus areas of:

  • Agriculture and Water Security

  • Domestic Revenue Mobilization

  • Adolescent Girls’ Education and Skills
  • Energy (IFC only)

Cross-cutting areas include Fragility, Conflict, and Violence (FCV), Gender, Digital Development, and Jobs. Eligible projects have been selected from countries across the AFW region to represent a diverse range of priorities and challenges.

Following the workshop, selected projects will continue to receive tailored support throughout project implementation to optimize project design through evidence, analytics, and randomized controlled trials and to rigorously evaluate resulting project impacts. Lessons and experiences will continue to be shared across the AFW LEADS community of practice.

Objectives

LEADS is designed to:

  • Integrate Global Evidence: Provide curated, evidence-based insights to guide project design and implementation.

  • Foster Cross-Sector Learning: Facilitate knowledge exchange across sectors and countries to scale effective solutions.

  • Build Impact Evaluation Capacity: Offer cutting-edge tools and methods in monitoring, evaluation, and impact assessment.

  • Achieve Greater Development Impact: Integrate data, evidence, and experimentation in project management to achieve greater results and promote learning for individual projects and across the portfolio

Who Should Attend

The AFW LEADS workshop is a closed, invitation-only event for pre-selected projects and participants from the World Bank, IFC, and partners.

The workshop will bring together:

  • Government counterparts

  • World Bank and IFC senior management and project task teams

  • Academic researchers with expertise in focus areas

  • Development partners

Each project team will include approximately five representatives, comprising government officials and World Bank/IFC operational team members. These teams will collaborate with researchers specializing in their focus areas to connect operations, policy, and research, driving transformative change.

DATE: 05-09 May, 2025

LOCATION: Lomé, Togo

CONTACT: DIME Events

dime_events@worldbank.org

The workshop brings together Governments, World Bank Operations and Management, and Researchers to develop a new learning agenda for the region, addressing the most important questions for project teams and regional priorities alike. This is underpinned by rigorous and policy-focused research. By taking a regional portfolio approach, local solutions from country teams can be replicated and scaled across programs and contexts. The workshop includes the following sessions to equip participants with the tools needed to deliver on this agenda:  

Plenaries: World Bank senior management, global thought leaders and development partners present and discuss the biggest development priorities for the region and chart a high-level course for using evidence to inform the replication and scaling of high impact interventions and policies across Western and Central Africa. 

Thematic breakouts: Project teams will break out into thematic groups to learn about the latest and most relevant impact evaluation evidence in their sector. The idea is to learn from what has already been done so that projects can adopt tried and tested practices, while also ensuring that the impact evaluations teams develop help build evidence to fill strategic knowledge gaps.  

Methods: A series of training sessions aimed at equipping government and World Bank teams with the technical tools needed to understand and integrate high-quality data collection strategies, impact evaluation and AI into their projects.   

Clinics: This is where all the formal presentations are put into practice. Teams will break out into their respective project groups and will be matched with researchers from the World Bank and leading universities around the world to apply the learning to their project. The objective is to develop an impact evaluation design and broader learning strategy for each project. These will be presented to the workshop participants on the last day and will form the basis for the AFW LEADS learning agenda going forward. 

Full English Agenda

Full French Agenda

Day 1  Kick off the workshop with an introduction to LEADS, high-level motivation from leadership, foundational training on experimental methods, and project-specific clinics focused on defining objectives and theory of change.
Day 2  Explore thematic evidence across priority sectors in breakout sessions, continue foundational training on impact evaluation methods, and discuss how governments can better use evidence and analytics to drive development results.
Day 3  Deepen technical skills through sessions on costing and cross-cutting themes (FCV, Gender, Digital, and Jobs), and continue shaping project evaluation strategies through clinics and interactive exchanges with experts.
Day 4  Wrap up thematic evidence sessions, explore partnership opportunities, and participate in focused clinics to refine presentation content and develop concrete learning agendas.
Day 5  Conclude the week with project team presentations showcasing tailored evaluation strategies, highlight opportunities for private sector engagement, and celebrate new collaborations during the closing ceremony.

What did some of the participating teams come up with?

  • Niger’s Livestock and Agriculture Modernization Project (LAMP) is a $1 billion initiative to enhance food security for 5 million people by upgrading irrigation systems, improving input supply chains, expanding market access, and financing agricultural SMEs. Following the LEADS workshop, the project plans to integrate evidence-backed practices including marginal water pricing through smart meters, informed by evidence in Mozambique that shows that feedback on water use reduces water gaps by 70%, and digital extension tools, informed by a study on Digital Green that estimates a tenfold increase in cost-effectiveness. The project plans to test water fee systems through a randomized trial across 50 irrigation sites. 
  • The Sub-Saharan Africa Women’s Empowerment and Demographic Dividend Plus (SWEDD+) regional project aims to expand access to education, economic opportunities, and health services for girls and women. In Togo, the project plans to offer vocational training to out-of-school young women aged 15–24. Following the LEADS workshop, the project is considering a comprehensive, evidence-based package including dual apprenticeships, life skills training, mentorship, asset transfers, and community-level behavioral change interventions—each shown to improve women’s socioeconomic outcomes across Africa. A randomized trial is proposed to assess the program’s effects on young women’s skills, income, and empowerment, as well as the added value of addressing harmful gender norms through community engagement.
  • Ghana’s Public Financial Management for Service Delivery (PFM4SD). This project aims to improve public resource mobilization, budget execution, and accountability. To do it, one central goal is to increasing adoption of the Ghana Integrated Financial Management Information System (GIFMIS) platform through evidence-based strategies that address human factors like performance reporting and incentives. Following the LEADS workshop, the project team plans to implement evidence-based strategies to boost direct system utilization among more than 300 MDAS and MMDAs. Interventions targeting human factors, such as performance reports and incentives, draw on evidence from Chile, where performance monitoring and reporting under specific conditions reduced overspending by up to 15% (equivalent to 0.1% of GDP). These interventions can then be refined through a trial-and-adopt impact evaluation to maximize effectiveness.
  • Access to electricity in Nigeria through mini grids by Husk Power Systems (Husk). Husk seeks to build many solar mini grids in Nigeria over the next five years. It is the first client under the IFC-DARES platform, a complementary intervention to the World Bank DARES program supporting the M300 initiative. The company is now working with IFC and the World Bank to develop a rigorous impact evaluation that will generate evidence on the economic, social and environmental impacts of clean electrification for individuals and businesses. This will inform the design of future projects under the platform and will help stimulate further investments in mini-grids.

Date: May 05 - 09, 2025 ET

Location: Lomé, Togo