Development Impact Fund

Tokyo LEADS is the next regional workshop under the World Bank’s LEADS [Learn. Adapt. Scale.] initiative, delivered in partnership with the World Bank Group Institute for Economic Development Tokyo Center, the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB). The workshop brought together 15 projects in 11 countries in East and Asia Pacific, creating an opportunity to see how LEADS tools, methods, and evidence approaches are being extended to partner institutions and to strengthen a community of like-minded agencies working to embed evidence and adaptive learning across development programs.

India LEADS marked the start of a new way of doing development in India: putting evidence, learning, and jobs at the center of how large programs are designed and delivered. In New Delhi, six flagship World Bank–supported programs—together representing $9.7 billion in financing—brought government leaders, Indian universities, global partners, and World Bank teams together to co-design how real-time evidence would shape delivery across cities, skills, MSMEs, forests, women’s employment, and health.

In Berlin, LEADS reached the European Union, where government representatives managing 27 cohesion policy operations gathered to leverage adaptive design and data for real-time policy learning for jobs, skills, innovation and the digital transition. Europe LEADS confirmed that LEADS is not just a tool for low- and middle-income countries—it is a global model for smarter public spending.

In May, over 200 thinkers, builders, and change-makers from government, the private sector, the World Bank Group, and partners met in Lomé, Togo, to launch Africa LEADS in Western and Central Africa. They brought with them $5.3 billion in IDA, and IBRD, and IFC financing across 20 investments in 11 countries—and rolled up their sleeves to use scientific evidence, behavioral insights, and adaptive delivery methods to amplify potential in their operations.

The workshop marks the launch of the Africa LEADS program. The program offers a framework for projects to (i) collectively Learn from each other and through impact evaluation research; (ii) wire in the ability for projects to Adapt based on this evidence, and (iii) Scale the most effective approaches across the region. The event brought together approximately 30 project teams working on selected World Bank-financed operations in the Eastern and Southern Africa region.